Kristan Hanson

Stacy Lloyd fellow, 2019

Kristan Hanson is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas, where her research focuses on women and horticulture in late nineteenth-century French visual culture. 

“My dissertation topic aligns perfectly with Rachel Lambert Mellon’s collection of rare and unique materials pertaining to plants, gardens, and landscapes as well as her interest in French Impressionist paintings,” Kristan said.

During her residency, Kristan consulted rare books, botanical illustrations, and other resources related to her dissertation "In Bloom: Women and Horticulture in French Visual Culture, 1860s-1880s." The interdisciplinary project examined how painters responded to the key roles of Parisian women and plant mobility in local and global horticultural networks. Kristan used the library’s collections to research the emergence of domestic gardening and floral arranging as gendered leisure pursuits, the contributions of understudied women artists to the field of botanical illustration, as well as the formation of transregional horticultural trade routes and their impact on social practices and artistic representations in nineteenth-century France. A focus of her research were the botanical illustrations of pelargoniums by artists Lise Cloquet and Baroness van Lyden, whose work helped to establish a fashion for those flowers in 1820s Europe.

You can read more about Kristan here.