Overview
Anne-Solène Bayan (she/her) studies nineteenth-century art and visual culture in Europe. Broadly, her research explores the politics of representation, difference, and empire in French prints. She is particularly interested in nineteenth-century histories of madness, disability, and creativity in France and its colonies.
Anne-Solène holds a B.F.A. in Art History and Film Production from Concordia University (2016) in Montréal, Québec and an M.A. in the History of Art from Williams College/The Clark Art Institute (2019) in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Her master’s qualifying paper, “‘The Necessities of Extremes and Contrasts’: Architecture, Race, and Geometry at Notre-Dame de Paris,” focused on the ideological underpinnings of the nineteenth-century restoration of the Notre-Dame cathedral.
Prior to matriculating at Cornell, Anne-Solène was Assistant Curator at Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia. From 2020 to 2024, she curated over a dozen exhibitions with particular focus on works on paper from the eighteenth century to today. In 2022, she published Gothic Soul: Charles Meryon, which notably reconsidered the oeuvre of a nineteenth-century French printmaker in light of his interest in Māori art and the natural landscape of the South Pacific.
At Cornell, Anne-Solène helps run the History of Art’s Graduate Student Association. In 2025, she was a Summer Graduate Fellow in the Digital Humanities.