Name Mary Sheriff | Role Art Historian | |
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Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Books The exceptional woman, Fragonard: Art and Eroticism, Moved by Love: Inspired |
Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World: Session 6
Mary Diana Lee Sheriff (September 19, 1950 – October 19, 2016) was an American art historian, and W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art History at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specialized in Eighteenth century French art, decorative arts, gender studies, and material culture.
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Sheriff was a leading scholar on 18th- and 19th-century French art and culture and the Rococo period. Her work focused on issues of creativity, sexuality, gender, and travel and culture exchange. Her research included traditional facets of visual culture such as painting and sculpture, while also incorporating gardens, book illustration, material culture, performance, and the graphic arts.
More recently, Sheriff expanded her research to Turquerie and cultural exchange in the eighteenth century, and Medusa as figure and symbol in art and culture.
She died on October 19, 2016 at the age of 66.