Dr. Erin Duncan-O’Neill is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma, specializing in nineteenth-century European art history. Her research focus is the creative response of artists to the pressures of censorship, specifically on print culture, politics, and censorship in France from the July Monarchy to the Third Republic. Her book, Art Against Censorship: Honoré Daumier, Comedy, and Resistance in 19th-Century France (Manchester University Press, 2024) investigates Honoré Daumier’s subversive paintings of seventeenth-century literary subjects in moments when political speech was censored. The story of Daumier’s persistent, seditious engagement with social and political issues under regimes of strict censorship provides historical context and a set of strategies for larger questions about art’s important role in resistance to censorial regimes.
The recipient of fellowships and awards including the Barr Ferree Foundation Publication Fund, the Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellowship, the Junior Faculty Fellowship, she will also publish a chapter in the forthcoming volume Censorship and Visual Culture: Ruling Images, Shaping Societies (Palgrave Macmillan) titled “Quills and Arrows: Daumier’s Saint Sebastian, Defamation, and Press Censorship in the French Second Republic.” This chapter investigates the ways in which defamation was imagined as a limit for press freedoms in French Republican thought and what this exception might reveal about the ways in which public and private life were defined in the modern era. Her article “Painting Molière as an Act of Rebellion: Honoré Daumier, Censored Speech, and Revivals of Theatrical Satire,” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 37, no. 2 (April-June 2021): 206-219 (DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2020.1866992), examines the legal frameworks linking a caricatural style of painting to theatrical performance and argues that by turning to Molière as a subject in paint when explicitly political material was being censored in print, Daumier’s works intervene in the contested space of speech in Second Empire France.
Dr. Duncan-O’Neill has been involved in curatorial work for the shows A Life in Looking: The Creighton Gilbert Collection at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art and Interesting Times: The Art of Honoré Daumier at the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art and speaks regularly about her new research at the College Art Association, De Montfort University in Leicester, University College Cork, the Midwest Art History Society Annual Conference, and Albion College, among other venues.
A popular teacher, Dr. Duncan-O’Neill’s courses include The Impressionist Revolt, Caricature and Satire, Nineteenth-Century Art, Art History Theory and Practice, Modern Art: Cézanne to 1950, Introduction to Art History, Seminar in British Art, and graduate seminars including Methodologies and Theories and Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century.
Dr. Duncan-O’Neill serves as the MA/ PhD Coordinator and Graduate Liaison for Art History. OU’s Art History program boasts an impressive Master’s Degree and PhD tracks in Native American Art History, Art of the American West, and European Art History supported by nationally-renown faculty. In addition to exciting teaching and research opportunities, students have received fellowships and internships at the Charles M. Russell Center for Art, the Fred Jones Museum of Art, Couse-Sharp Historic Site, the First Americans Museum, the Amon Carter Museum, and other impressive institutions. Our students have gone onto academic jobs at R1 universities as well as coveted curatorial positions throughout the United States. Please direct inquiries or interest to her at erinduncanoneill@ou.edu.
Email:erinduncanoneill@ou.edu
