Biography
Anne Leonard specializes in 19th century European art, particularly that of France and Belgium. Her research interests include Symbolism and Wagnerism, attention and modes of aesthetic experience, time in painting, and nationalism and internationalism. A primary area of scholarly focus has been the relations between visual art and music, which are the subject of a book she co-edited with musicologist Tim Shephard, The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (2014), the first comprehensive reference work in this field. She has published six exhibition catalogues at the Smart Museum, chapters in several edited volumes, and an article in the Art Bulletin.
Her principal appointment is as Curator and Associate Director of Academic Initiatives at the Smart Museum, where she has worked since 2003. She oversees the pre-1900 European collection and has curated numerous exhibitions of European and American art, often in collaboration with University faculty and graduate students. She also directs the Smart’s academic initiatives, an extension of the renowned Mellon Program that since the 1990s has integrated the Museum ever more closely into the academic mission of the University. In her courses for the Department of Art History, she engages the resources of the Smart collection in order to provide students with hands-on exposure to original works of art. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and has worked in curatorial departments at the Fogg Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
