Maura Coughlin is Teaching Professor in the Department of Art + Design at Northeastern University. Her recent research centers ecological networks in the study of French Atlantic visual culture. Her publications of the last decade have been focused on late nineteenth-century art and material culture of the Brittany and Normandy coasts. From seaweed, salt harvesting and fishing to the Breton culture of death and mourning, her work has explored ecologies and communities of the North Atlantic French coast. She often collaborates with Emily Gephart: in 2020 they published a co edited collection Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture, with Routledge, in 2021 their essay on ocean waves appeared in Picture Ecology, Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective (2021). They have forthcoming joint publications in the forthcoming collection Methods for Ecocritical Art History (2025, Leuven University Press).
Research/Publications Highlights
Co-editor with Emily Gephart of Ecocriticism and The Anthropocene in Nineteenth Century Art and Visual Culture. Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies Series, 2019.
“Visualizing Resource Extraction, 1840-1910” (introduction to “Commentaries” section co-authored with Emily Gephart), American Art (Smithsonian) Spring, 2025. Pgs. 2-7.
“‘These cod factories’: A Plantation of North Atlantic Fish” American Art (Smithsonian) Spring, 2025. Pgs. 34-41.
“Why Look at Dead Animals?” in NOTORIOUS, a special issue of Curator: The Museum Journal. 18 July 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12566
“Women of the West: Costumes, Ecologies and Allegories” in Eds. Fintan Cullen and Fiona Barber, The Routledge Companion to Irish Art. Routledge Art History and Visual Studies, 2025. Pgs. 254-265.
“Wrack Line Design: Seaweed in Visual Culture and Amateur Science in France” in Naomi Slipp and Maura Coughlin, A Singularly Marine & Fabulous Produce: The Cultures of Seaweed. New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2023. pgs 15-24.
“Reading the Wrack Line: Atlantic Flow on the Brittany Coast.” in Eds. Kathleen Davidson, Molly Duggins, Sea Currents: Art, Science and the Commodification of the Ocean World in the Long Nineteenth Century. Bloomsbury Academic Press, May 2023. Pgs. 101-120.
“Bovine Ubiquity” in Eds. Katie Hornstein and Daniel Harkett, Animal Modernities, Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories, 1750-1900. Leuven University Press, June, 2025.
Departments
Art + Design
Education
- PhD, New York University, Modern Art History
- MA, Tufts University, Art History
- BA, UMass Amherst, Art History
- BA, UMass Amherst, English
Research Focus
- Ecocritical Art History
- French visual culture of the long 19th century
Courses Taught
- Modern Art and Design History
- Ecology in Art and Design
- Still and Moving Image