Françoise Baillet is currently a Senior Lecturer in British Studies at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, France, where she has taught history and art since 2004. Her research addresses British cultural history in the nineteenth century, and focuses in particular on fin-de-siècle painting, the Victorian press and the text-image interplay in illustrated literature.
She is the author of a doctoral thesis (2002, Paris-Sorbonne) on George du Maurier’s pictorial criticism of Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism, and has published articles on Victorian painters and black-and-white artists.
She is currently working on a book project entitled Visions and Divisions. Punch’s Cultural Discourses and the Victorian Social Order (1850-1880) which examines the visual discourse of the magazine (with caricature as its central aesthetic code) as a way of maintaining social, gender and artistic borders in Victorian England. Her latest articles deal with the representation of workers and paupers in The Illustrated London News and The Graphic.