david.mitchell2@mail.mcgill.ca
David Mitchell: I am currently a PhD candidate in McGill’s Department of Art History and Communication Studies. My doctoral research focuses on the intersection of material practices of wax sculpture with contemporaneous textual considerations of boredom, emptiness, and idolatry in Louis XIV’s France and the following Regency. Under the title “Mimetic Heresies: Waxworks in Paris, 1661-1723,” my dissertation relates the tenuous cultural status of wax portraits in this period to their long-standing religious function, competing conceptions of materiality, and a shifting currency of verisimilitude.