Assistant Professor
B.A. Queen’s University
M.A., Ph.D University of London

Mary Hunter specializes in nineteenth-century French art and visual culture, and teaches on the politics of representation from the nineteenth century to the present. She is interested in: the relationship between art and medicine; the construction of reality; the competing claims to truth made by different media and formal practices; the formation of masculine identities; the construction of sexuality, gender, race, sickness and health; the relationship between popular, artistic and scientific spectacles; and the politics of looking. Before joining McGill in September 2007, Hunter was editorial assistant at the Oxford Art Journal, taught at University College London and was the Helfand Fellow at the New York Academy of Medicine.

Hunter’s current research explores where, how and why the worlds of art and medicine overlapped during the Third Republic. Through an examination of sources surrounding the production, display and receptions of medical iconography, such as Salon portraits, popular photographs, medical wax models and representations of medical innovations, Hunter looks at how artists and doctors worked together to create representations of bodies. By bringing together and examining various materials - medical text books, artists’ manuals, paintings, encyclopedias, doctors’ letters and meeting notes, caricatures, dictionaries, novels, professional purchases, newspapers, art reviews, and, importantly, the multiple objects found in medical museums and hospitals, such as wax models, painted portraits, photographs, plaster casts, marble busts and drawings – Hunter explores what is at stake in the relationship between art and medical iconography.

Hunter is currently working on a manuscript titled Medical Bodies: Art, Science and Sexuality in late Nineteenth-Century France that expands from her Ph.D “Collecting Bodies: Art, Medicine and Sexuality in late Nineteenth-Century France” (London, 2007). Current and upcoming publications and lectures include: “Effroyable Realisme: Wax, Femininity and the Madness of Realist Fantasies” in the impending special issue of RACARon art and medicine; books reviews for the Oxford Art Journal and the Journal of Women’s History; and papers “Dissecting Doctors and Corpses” at the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Conference in Nashville in October 2008 and “Under the Knife: Art, Autopsies and the Construction of Medical Identities” at the Social Studies of Medicine Department at McGill on 17 November 2008.