The Department of Art History is pleased to announce that Ivana Dizdar successfully defended her PhD dissertation on June 27, 2025. Titled “L’arctique à La Parisienne: Visualizing the Polar North in France, 1839-1889,” Ivana’s novel study “examines representations of the Arctic in nineteenth-century France, with a focus on visual and material culture produced or circulated in Paris between 1839 and 1889. It explores the way an Arctic-mania emerged in France, evolving largely through visual media: paintings, panoramas, photographs, ethnographic sculptures, illustrated prints, and elements of interior design that animated a cultural ethos she calls ‘l’Arctique à la Parisienne’. Ivana shows how representations of Arctic motifs—from Inuit to ice to polar bears—not only reflected but also shaped the way French artists, writers, explorers, scientists, surveyors, cartographers, merchants, missionaries, and the public understood their relationship to the polar north. The project develops through four themes: human-animal encounters; climate and ice; ethnography and human exhibitions; and, finally, extraction and commerce. As a historiographic intervention, the project reveals how French representations of the Arctic constitute a critical narrative within French art history and within a global history of modernity.”
Sincere thanks to PhD supervisor Mark Cheetham, and committee members Jordan Bear and Elizabeth Harney, for their support of Ivana’s work throughout her doctoral studies. For their careful and generous attention to Ivana’s dissertation, thanks to external examiners Prof. Katie Hornstein (Dartmouth College) and Prof. Brian Jacobson (Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design and CalTech).
Ivana has held long-term fellowships at Princeton University, in Paris, and currently at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. This September, she will begin a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University.
Congratulations to Dr. Dizdar, and all best wishes for your future!