Biography
Alex Fraser specializes in art, architecture, and decoration of the long nineteenth century. Her teaching and scholarship emphasize the lived, felt experience of objects of art and design, and frequently pursue its entanglements with literature, the built environment, social theory, and theories of art itself. This work often aims to expand our understanding of what intimate, domestic, spaces of private life what can tell us about shifts in social experience as well as the challenges and consequences of its representation under conditions of global modernity.
Currently, these interests gather around two larger projects. The first, a book manuscript, is a migratory study of the domestic interior as a site of artistic experimentation and index of modern experience across late-nineteenth century Europe. The second is a curatorial and scholarly “biography” of home art collections around Detroit after World War II, and explores the livability of earlier European modernism amidst the sharp rise and transformation of the industrial Midwest. Fraser received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (2018), MA from the University of Chicago (2009), and BA from the University of British Columbia (2008). Her writing has appeared in West 86th, Design and Culture, Panorama, as well as in edited volumes in France and North America.