Jane Dieulafoy’s Persia: Gender, Empire, and Archaeology in fin-de-siècle France

with Julia Hartley

The archaeologist, photographer, and writer Jane Dieulafoy (1851–1916) worked at the intersection of nineteenth-century power structures. They served France’s national and imperial interests by extracting priceless artefacts from Iran. Cross-dressing and drawing on their celebrity status, they also openly critiqued gender norms. This is the first project to bring together Dieulafoy’s expansive body of work on ancient Iran: fieldwork, 902 photographs, curatorial work, press interviews, non-fiction publications, historical novels, and a musical play created with Saint-Saëns. Through this multi-media corpus, I show how gender, nationalism, and imperialism have historically interacted and shaped the fields of archaeology, photography, museology, and historiography.

About the speakers:

Julia Hartley is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. Prior to joining the University of Glasgow in 2023, she was Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. She completed a BA, Masters, and doctorate (2016) in French and Italian literature at the University of Oxford. In 2017, she also completed a second Masters in Iranian Studies at SOAS.