05/26/2026
Congratulations to Professor Wunsch who won the ASECS James Clifford Prize for his article, “The Aesthetic Redemption of the Black Body in Eighteenth-Century France,” which was published in the journal Art History in February 2025.
The ASECS citation said Wunsch “adeptly demonstrates ‘how the differing goals of artists and philosophers yielded divergent forms of engagement with Blackness,’” arguing that “the aesthetic aims of painters, focused on producing ‘visual pleasure,’ introduce a disjuncture between a social discourse that would at times marginalize or demean Black subjects and the formal qualities involved in capturing Blackness,” a phenomenon Wunsch calls “the ‘aesthetic redemption’ of the Black body.”
ASECS called Wunsch’s article “valuable (essential?) reading for anyone interested in visual art, aesthetic theory, natural philosophy, historiography, and exhibition curation.”
https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/sites/bc-news/articles/2026/spring/dual-honors-for-wunsch.html?q