Announcing the recipient of the 2024 APS Publication Grant

The Association of Print Scholars is pleased to award its eighth annual Publication Grant to Susan Wager. The grant, in the amount of $2,000,  will support the production of her book, Pompadour’s Medium: Luxury and Reproduction in Eighteenth-Century France (forthcoming with University of Delaware Press). The APS Publication Grant is funded through the Association of Print Scholars and the generosity of C.G. Boerner and Harris Schrank.

Wager’s book examines Madame de Pompadour’s amateur printmaking and includes an analysis of the Suite d’estampes gravées par madame la marquise de Pompadour d’après les pierres gravées de Guay, graveur du Roy (1753). Wager argues that the suite demonstrates Pompadour’s engagement with creativity, originality, and the materials of reproduction. Elsewhere, Wager considers her subject’s collaboration with François Boucher and her interest in luxury reproductions: gems, ceramics, textiles, and precious metals. In so doing, the book advocates how a preoccupation with the material processes of translation – from one medium to another – as seen in the work of Madame de Pompadour, contributed to eighteenth-century ideas about authorship, creativity, and hierarchies of the arts. The jurors particularly noted the significance of Wager’s project for the study of both women artists and the materiality of reproductive media. 

Susan Wager is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, where she teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art. Her work on Madame de Pompadour, François Boucher, and the translation of images between prints, porcelain, and other media has been published in The Art Bulletin, The Burlington Magazine, Journal18, and the edited volume Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change (Bloomsbury, 2023). Wager holds a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University and has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Samuel H. Kress Predoctoral Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD, where she curated the exhibition Madame de Pompadour: Patron and Printmaker (2016). 

APS would like to thank Carey Gibbons, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of North Texas; Hope Saska, Chief Curator and Director of Academic Engagement at the University of Colorado Art Museum; and Asiel Sepulveda, Assistant Professor of Art History at Babson College, for their service and commitment to the grant selection process.

The Association of Print Scholars is grateful to C.G. Boerner and Harris Schrank for their continued support of the organization and its mission.

To learn more about the APS Publication Grant online, click here. 

Please contact grants@printscholars.org with any questions regarding this announcement.