Allan Doyle is an Assistant Professor of 18th- and 19th-century European Art at Parsons School of Design at The New School. His principal research focuses on the emergence of the figure of the modern artist in French Romanticism, investigating the shift from an academic to an entrepreneurial model of art pedagogy and production.

He received his PhD from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University and his MFA from Tufts University/The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His research has been supported by fellowships from Harvard University’s I Tatti, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. His work has appeared in Representations and the Whitechapel Gallery’s Documents of Contemporary Art series, as well as publications from the Getty Research Institute and the University Press of New England.

As a GIDEST Faculty Fellow, Allan will work on his current monograph, Michelangelo and the Invention of the Modern Artist, which analyzes Michelangelo Buonarroti’s afterlife in France during the Restoration and July Monarchy. During his fellowship, he will complete the book’s final chapter, which examines Michelangelo’s legacy in North American popular culture in the post-WWII period. Following the return of servicemen from overseas, there was a significant expansion of illustrated publications dedicated to bodybuilding. Photographs of bodybuilders and physique models were produced in the hundreds of thousands during a time when North American masculinity was in crisis.

His argument situates how aspiring artists drew upon the authority and formal/structural queerness of the academic tradition while marketing their works directly to customers. The development of this demographic of queer consumers was crucial to the formation of gay male identity in the pre-Stonewall era. As his broader project argues was the case a century prior, Michelangelo was used both as an authoritative predecessor and as a model of an entrepreneurial artist—one who opened up the elite academic tradition to the democratizing effects of popular taste.