
Biography
Marie-Agathe Simonetti’s research focuses on photography produced in Vietnam during the French colonization. Her dissertation “Photography in Indochina: Politics, Press, and War in Saigon, Hanoi, and Paris, 1897–1954” examines photography as politics from the French and Vietnamese perspectives. Her work studies photographs from the French empire and from Vietnamese revolutionaries, integrating the medium into the history and art history of Vietnam.
Marie-Agathe holds a M.A in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her M.A. thesis “The École des Beaux-Arts de L’Indochine : Victor Tardieu and French Art Between the Wars” won the University of Illinois at Chicago Outstanding Thesis and Dissertation Award. She also holds two B.A., one in Art History and one in Law from the University Lumière Lyon 2.
More broadly, her interests include French colonial art, Vietnamese painting and the French colonial empire. Her research has been supported by the École française d’Extrême-Orient, UW-Madison’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the Graduate School and the Art History department.
Primary Advisor(s)
Preeti Chopra