Linda Goddard

French art and literature of the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries; artists’ writings, especially life writing by women artists

Linda Goddard is a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art and literature, and artists’ writings. She holds a BA in French and Italian language and literature from the University of Oxford and an MA and PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She joined St Andrews in 2009 after a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Courtauld, and a fixed-term Lectureship at the University of Cambridge. From 2019–2022 she was Head of the School of Art History at St Andrews.

She has been a Member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2014-15), and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, DC (2018).

Linda has recently begun a new project on the life writings of women artists in nineteenth-century France and beyond. She delivered a course on “Women Artists and Life Writing around 1900” in Amsterdam as the 2025 Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow.

Her most recent book, Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin (Yale University Press, 2019) is the first book-length analysis of the artist’s wide-ranging literary output. Her first book, Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, 1880–1926 (Peter Lang, 2012) examined how the rejection of mimesis in painting affected literary responses to the visual arts. She has edited or co-edited two journal special issues devoted to the interpretation of artists’ writings: Artists’ Writings, 1850-present (Word & Image), including her essay, “Artists’ Writings: word or image?” and (with Natalie Adamson) Artists’ Statements: Origins, Intentions, Exegesis (Forum for Modern Language Studies), both 2012.  

At St Andrews she teaches undergraduate modules including “Women Artists and Autobiography” and “Symbolism, Decadence and Modernity” and co-teaches the postgraduate modules “The Image of the Artist” and “Writing on the Visual”.

She welcomes enquiries from potential PhD students with interests in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art – particularly its intersections with literature – women artists and artists' writings.

Recently completed PhD students

Eunjee Lee (co-supervised with Jeremy Howard), ‘“When East meets West”: Emil Orlik, Helen Hyde, Elizabeth Keith, and Western printmakers in East Asia in the early twentieth century”

Maria Golovteeva, 'Fernand Khnopff: Art and Photography in the Nineteenth Century'