Committee on Faculty Research Support (COFRS) Award for Professor Weingarden

Professor Lauren S. Weingarden has been granted a 2015 – 2016 Committee on Faculty Research Support (COFRS) award. The COFRS program provides faculty with summer salary to assist with research and creative endeavors that encourage external funding.

Prof. Weingarden will use the award to begin writing her new book, Embodying Baudelairean Modernity: A Neuroarthistory of the Painters of Modern Life, a two-pronged study that brings together neuroaesthetics and art history in the interpretation of the fragmentation and transformation of the modern urban experience, as it took shape during the demolition and rebuilding of Paris under Haussmannization. Charles Baudelaire’s ‘ironic’ definition of modernity provides the model for demonstrating the intersection of visual and verbal parody in contemporaneous art forms. Utilizing a unique word-and-image methodology, this study exposes the formation of ironic parody as a pictorial device for representing rupture and transformation shared by artist and viewer. Coincidently, this study adapts twenty-first century neuroaesthetics in an effort to capture the “lived” experience of nineteenth-century modern urban phenomena. These non-art historical models provide scientific data and terminology to identify the visceral forces and neural activity that trigger conscious knowing. Neuroarthistory applies to art historians’ use of scientific research as tools to excavate the physical and psychic embodiment of nineteenth-century modernity.