Aleksandra Bursac

Aleksandra's areas of interest have spanned both the 18th and 19th centuries. Her first Master's in Fine and Decorative Arts with the Sotheby's Institute of Art in London, focused on late 18th century architecture in France. This was followed by a curatorial internship for two exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Casanova’s Europe. Art, Pleasure and Power in the 18th-century (2018), and La Parisienne (2017). She then obtained her second Master's from The University of Toronto, where she focused on modern art, specifically Edgar Degas's laundresses, while also working as curatorial intern for the Art Gallery of Ontario's exhibition: Building a New World: Impressionism in the Age of Industry (2019). Her doctoral dissertation builds upon this research and explores Degas's laundresses in more detail, focusing on materiality and intermediality in this series.

Publications:

• "Pressing Matters: Degas’s Ironers and the Main-d’œuvre of the Artist.” In Nineteenth-Century Contexts 46. DOI
• "Idyll to Industry: Infrastructures of Cleanliness in Nineteenth-Century France.” In Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism. Edited by Britany Salsbury. Exh. Cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), pp.
  73-86.

Honours, Awards and Grants

• 2022 CEFMF Centre for the Study of France and the Francophone World Short-Term Research Grant
• 2022 SGS Research Travel Grant
• 2020 GEF Department of Visual Studies - University of Toronto, Mississauga