The Department is proud to announce that Martina Zago has won the Sir Ernest Barker Prize from the Political Studies Association (PSA) of the United Kingdom.
The annual prize is given to the best thesis in political theory, broadly construed, and is generally regarded as a leading dissertation prize in the field.
Her thesis, Civilization as an Aesthetic Concept: Eugène Delacroix, Paul Gauguin and Juan Luna, 1798 – 1903, was supervised by Professor Barbara Arneil and Assistant Professor Anna Jurkevics.
The awards committee commended Zago’s paper for its confidence and depth of thinking — noting that the “manuscript is engaging and ambitious with a strong sense of purpose throughout — and that it “handles complex ideas with assurance and clarity, offering a thoughtful and compelling piece of work.”
The dissertation is a study of the role of three nineteenth-century painters (Eugène Delacroix, Paul Gauguin, and Juan Luna) in transforming the languages and practices of the Enlightenment-born concept of civilization. Artists, I claim, have been directly involved in political battles: not only have they summarized existing political arguments and presented them more persuasively or attractively, but have also expressed---including in pictorial form---political thought that was original in its historical context. Drawing on speech act theory, the dissertation develops a contextualist argument about the under-theorization of art in political theory. It explores how paintings can say and do things, as well as elicit intentional and unintentional effects. Moreover, to put Delacroix, Gauguin, and Luna in conversation with, respectively, Friedrich Schiller, Denis Diderot, and José Rizal, is to reveal a buried treasure: a culturally pluralist, humanist, and anti-imperialist tradition of thinking about civilization as an aesthetic concept.
Dusting off this tradition, I contend, problematizes conventional depictions of the nineteenth century as a period of uncontested feelings of European civilizational superiority and confident imperial liberalism. It also retrieves a more global imaginary of the concept that now seems of urgent value, as discourses of civilization, barbarism, and savagery have taken on newfound importance, both within the West and beyond it.
