Dr Thomas Stammers

Associate Professor (Modern European Cultural History)

Affiliations
Affiliation	Room number	Telephone
Associate Professor (Modern European Cultural History) in the Department of History		+44 (0) 191 33 41071
Member of the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture

Biography

Tom Stammers is a cultural historian of France in the long nineteenth century. His 2020 book The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Cultures in Post-Revolutionary Paris (Cambridge University Press) explores the politics of collecting, the art market and cultural heritage in nineteenth-century France. It was named the winner of the 2020 Gladstone Prize from the Royal Historical Society for the best first book on non-British history. He continues to publish work related to nineteenth-century collecting, connoisseurship, museum institutions and the historiography of art, with a particular interest in the work of Francis Haskell. He also publishes on the tangible traces, cultural memory and historiography of the French Revolution.

He has two major forthcoming projects. The first concerns the experiences of the Orleans dynasty in exile after 1848 and the transformation of the political culture of monarchism. Analysing the itineraries, liberal ideas, cosmopolitan friendships and collections of Louis-Philippe, comte de Paris (1838-94), this work work fits into a wider exploration of the global networks of nineteenth-century royalism.

The second project grows out of past research related to anti-Semitism, the art market and Jewish collectors in the late nineteenth century. Tom is co-investigator for the major AHRC grant "Jewish" Country Houses: Objects, Networks, People (2019-23), where has has responsbility for the strand dedicated to exploring Jewish collecting in modern Europe. The grant investigates the social, cultural and material world of Jewish country houses as a pan-European phenomenon, and involves collaborations with historic houses, galleries and heritage organisations in Britain and Europe. For more information, see: jch.history.ox.ac.uk.

He is a regular contributor and feature writer for the arts magazine Apollo, as well as other literary and arts reviews, and in January 2017 co-curated an exhibition at the Bowes Museum on 'The Allure of Napoleon'. He is the deputy director of CNCS and sits on the board of the Zurbaran Centre. In 2021-22, Tom will be co-director of the Durham Centre for Visual Arts and Cultures (CVAC) with Professor Christina Riggs. He has supervised a large number of graduate students, including on collaborative doctoral projects with the Bowes Museum and the National Gallery, London.

Tom is interested in a wide range of historiographical and theoretical controversies related to Europe in the long nineteenth century.

Research interests

France, c.1750-1900
The French Revolutionary Tradition
Heritage and Historical Consciousness
Museums and Collecting
Aesthetics and Politics
The Enlightenment and European Romanticism
Jewish Cultural History
Counter-Revolutionary Thought and Culture c.1789-1900

Research groups

Britain and Continental Europe
Modern
Visual and Material Culture

Esteem Indicators

0000: Deakin Fellow (European Studies Centre Oxford/ Maison Francaise d'Oxford) 2015-16:
0000: Winner of the French History Best Article Prize 2008:
0000: Winner of the RHS Gladstone Prize 2021:

Publications

Authored book

Stammers, Thomas (2020). The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Cultures in Post-Revolutionary Paris c.1790–1890. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter in book

Stammers, Tom (2021). Delecluze’s Augustus And Cinna: Painting and Performing Rome at the End of the Napoleonic Empire. In Representing the Past in the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century Historicism, Postmodernism, and Internationalism. Potter, Matthew C. Routledge. 48-69.
Stammers, Tom (2021). Collecting and the Contemporary Antiquarian: Documenting the Present in Fin-de-Siecle Paris. In Time on a Human Scale: Experiencing the Present in Europe, c.1860-1930. Wright, J & Fryxell, A Oxford University Press. 121-155.
Stammers, Thomas (2021). Salvage and Speculation: The London Art Market After the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). In Museums, Modernity and Conflict. Museums and Collections in and of War since the Nineteenth Century. Hill, Kate London: Routledge. 15-38.
Stammers, Tom (2017). Graphiksammler. In Lexikon der Revolutions-Ikonographie in der europäischen Druckgraphik (1789-1889). Reichardt, Rolf Münster: Rhema. 1: 149-166.
Stammers, Tom (2016). The Myth of the Belle Madeleine: street culture and celebrity in nineteenth-century Paris. In Food Hawkers: Selling in the street from Antiquity to the Present. Calaresu, M. & Heuvel, Danielle van Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 136-164.
Stammers, Tom (2016). Enlightenment Intersections in the work of Jeffrey Rubinoff. In The Art of Jeffrey Rubinoff. Fox, James Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre. 153-168.
Stammers, Tom (2016). Jean-Louis Soulavie: une collection de l'histoire immédiate. In Collectionner la Révolution française. Bertrand, Gilles Biard, Michel & Chevalier, Alain Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes. 81-93.
Stammers, Tom (2014). Scavenging rococo: Trouvailles, Bibelots and Counter-Revolutionary Politics. In Rococo Echo: Art, History and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola. Hyde, M. & Scott,K. Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford. 71-86.
Stammers, Tom (2013). Rendering the Rag-Picker in Nineteenth-Century Paris. In Generals and Beggars, Actors and Sovereigns: Portraits in Widely Circulating Prints from the XVII to XX Century. Milano, Alberto Tassotti. 393-99.
Stammers, Tom (2013). The Faubourg Saint-Antoine: Epicentre of Revolution? In The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris. Milne, Anna-Louise Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 52-70.
Stammers, Tom (2008). The Refuse of the Revolution: Autograph Collecting in France 1789-1860. In Historicising the French Revolution. Armenteros,C., Blanning, T., DiVanna, I. & Dodds,D. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 39-63.

Conference Proceeding

Pauline Prevost-Marcilhacy & Laura de Fuccia (2020). L’exception anglaise ? Constance Battersea et la philanthropie artistique des Rothschild d’outre-manche. De la sphère privée à la sphère publique, INHA, Paris, Publications de l'Institut national d'histoire de l'art.

Edited book

Stammers, Tom (2017). The Allure of Napoleon: Essays Inspired by the Collections of the Bowes Museum. Barnard Castle, The Bowes Museum.

Edited Journal

Stammers, Tom (2021). Women Collectors: Taste, Legacy and Cultural Philanthropy, 1850-1920. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 31
Stammers, Tom & Davoli, Silvia (2019). 'Introduction: Jewish Collectors and Collecting'. Journal of the History of Collections, (Virtual Special Issue).

Journal Article