https://www.deutscharthistory.com/Dr Allison Deutsch is a specialist in nineteenth-century French painting and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She joined Oxford Lifelong Learning in 2023 and has directed the undergraduate Certificate and Diploma programmes in History of Art. Dr Deutsch has also taught and held Fellowships at Birkbeck, University of London, and University College London [UCL]. Her work has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL. In 2021 her first book, Consuming Painting: Food and the Feminine in Impressionist Paris, was published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, and she has authored chapters in edited volumes with Routledge and Yale University Press. Deutsch’s articles have appeared in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Dix-Neuf, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, among other journals. Deutsch is a founding member of the Impressionist Futures Group.
Dr Allison Deutsch
Departmental Lecturer in History of Art
Deputy Course Director for the Certificate in History of Art Year 2 and Diploma in History of Art Years 1 and 2
Allison joined Oxford after a decade of teaching across a range of institutions and audiences. At Oxford Lifelong Learning she has directed the Undergraduate Certificate and Diploma programmes in History of Art, where she teaches courses spanning French painting from the Baroque period through the early twentieth century. She also offer modules and short courses on subjects including Impressionism, art in the age of French revolutions, and introductions to the methods and historiography of art history. When possible she emphasises research-led teaching, bringing her current scholarship, archival discoveries, and curatorial work into the classroom. Students are encouraged to think about how art history is written, revised, and presented to different publics. Many of her courses are shaped by interests in feminist histories of art and colonial legacies in art’s creation and interpretation.
Her current research asks how French Impressionism became entangled in debates surrounding race, national identity, sexual difference, and women’s rights. Her current book project, ‘Impressionism at the Margins: Colonialism and the Critical Reception’, addresses an imperial imaginary through which many nineteenth-century writers expressed anxiety about impressionism. This project has been made possible by funding from The Leverhulme Trust.
To date, Allison’s publications have focused on the relationship between art and sensory experience, the sexual politics of paintings of food and dining, and art and the Paris Commune. Her first book, Consuming Painting: Food and the Feminine in French Art and Criticism, 1865–1890 (Penn State University Press, 2021), examines the culinary metaphors that the most influential nineteenth-century critics used to express their attraction or disgust toward modern-life painting. The migrating language of food and consumption reveals the visceral reactions that these paintings invited in their earliest publics, offering new histories for familiar artworks and fresh possibilities for experiencing and interpreting them.
Alongside her individual research she is committed to collaborative and public-facing scholarship. She is a founding member of the Impressionist Futures Group and co-curator of a travelling exhibition exploring the reproduction of Mary Cassatt’s paintings in early twentieth-century American magazines.
- Deutsch with Choi, Clark, and Meenen. “Fourteen Recent Exhibitions of Impressionist Art,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Vol. 25, Issue 1, Spring 2026.
- ‘Race and the Problem of Impressionist Skin’, in The Routledge Companion to Art and Challenges to Empire, eds. Emily C. Burns and Alice M. Rudy Price. Routledge, December 2025, pp. 196-214.
- ‘The Gender of Food’, in Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism, ed. Andrew Eschelbacher. Yale University Press, 2024, pp. 57-76.
- ‘Des œuvres solides et vivantes qu’il rêvait: Rethinking Claude Lantier’s Chef d’œuvre’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 53:1-2, Autumn/Winter 2024, pp. 85-106.
- Consuming Painting: Food and the Feminine in Impressionist Paris. Penn State UP, 2021.
- ‘The Flesh of Painting: Caillebotte’s Modern Olympia’, Dix-Neuf, 22:1-2, December 2017, pp. 1-22.
- ‘Food and Art in the Nineteenth Century’, special issue of Food & History co-edited with Müller, Beyers, and Van Damme, 16:2, 2018.
- ‘Discovering Degas’ Web Resource. Available: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/cca/research/arthistoryresearch/discoveringdegas/videointerviews/
