Living Proof: Figuring Queer Negativity in Post-WWII Physique Photography

Allan Doyle is an Assistant Professor of 18th- and 19th-century European Art at Parsons School of Design. 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.

Allan received his Ph.D. from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University and an 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 is working 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.