Catherine Clark

Faculty Director; Fall 2020 Faculty Fellow, Associate Professor of History and French Studies

Catherine Clark

Faculty Director; Fall 2020 Faculty Fellow, Associate Professor of History and French Studies

Catherine Clark is a historian of modern France and its visual cultures. She is Associate Professor of History and French Studies, Co-Chair of MIT’s Global France Seminar, and Faculty Director of the MIT Programs in Digital Humanities. Her research is largely concerned with how the visual produces knowledge: in the past, in contemporary historical practices, and with the implement of digital and computational image analysis. Her interest in visual culture and the city has led her to write about the histories of commercial street photography in France after 1945, the Vidéothèque de Paris, the production of Marco Ferreri’s 1974 film Touche pas à la femme blanche!/Don’t Touch the White Woman, shot in the destruction site of the former market pavilions at les Halles, as well as the history of dam-building in the Alps and the French TV show Les Revenants/The Returned (2012-2015). Clark has held residential fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France and been a visiting associate professor of visual culture and history at the California Institute of Technology. Her book Paris and the Cliché of History (Oxford University Press, 2018), a history of Paris’s photographic history, won the 2018-2019 Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies.

Photo credit: Maggie Shannon