Ph.D. Columbia University, 1989
Department Chair
Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology

Professor Childs' major interests are French 19th-Century visual culture, art, and politics, exoticism (particularly the work of Paul Gauguin), history of photography, and caricature. She studied at Columbia University (PhD, 1989), where she wrote her dissertation on exoticism in the caricature of Honoré Daumier. Her first full-time teaching position was at the State University of New York at Purchase (1987-1992); she had a Florence Gould Foundation fellowship at Princeton University in 1992-1993 to study French painting and photography.

She arrived at Washington University in 1993, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1998. She spent 1996-1997 on sabbatical with a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers. She also received an Elisa Mellon Bruce Senior Visiting Fellowship which allowed her to spend the Spring of 1997 in residence at the Center for the Advanced Study of Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Professor Childs' teaching was honored when she was awarded the Council of Students in Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award in both 1996 and 2004. In 2005, she received an Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from the Graduate Student Senate of the university.

She especially enjoys visiting museums with students, and in 2004 organized a trip for students to view the major Gauguin exhibition at the Museum of the Arts, Boston, as well as several field trips to the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis and the St. Louis Art Museum.

A selected list of her publications includes:
– Daumier amd Exoticism: Satirizing the French and the Foreign, Peter Lang Press, 2004.
– "Catholicism and the Modern Mind: The Painter as Writer in Late Career," in Gauguin: Tahiti Musuem of Fine Arts Boston, 2004, pp. 223-242.
– "Gauguin as Author: Writing the Studio of the Tropics," The Van Gogh Museum Journal, 2003, pp. 70-87.
– "Eden's Other: Gauguin and the ethnographic grotesque," in Frances Connelly, ed. The Grotesque and Modern Art, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 175-192.
– "Seeking the Studio of the South: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Avant-Garde Identity," in Cornelia Homburg, ed. Vincent Van Gogh and the Painters of the Petit Boulevard, Rizzoli Press with the St. Louis Art Museum, 2001, pp. 113-152.
– "The Colonial Lens: Gauguin, Primitivism, and Photography in the fin-de-siècle," in Lynda Jessup, ed. Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, University of Toronto Press, 2001, pp. 50-70.
– Review of Stephen Eisenman's Gauguin's Skirt for the anthropological journal Pacific Studies (The Institute for Polynesian Studies, Laie, Hawaii), vol. 23, no1/2 (March-June 2000), pp. 75-85.
– Three essays [on Degas, on Gauguin, and on "The Photographic Muse"] in Dorothy Kosinski, The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso (Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 24-33; 70-87; 116-141.
– Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts, Seattle: University of Washington Press (1997)
"Time's Profile: John Wesley Powell, Geology, and Art at the Grand Canyon, 1869-1882," American Art, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 7-36
– (co-authored with John Klein) "Oceanic Escapes: Travel, Memory and Decoration in the Art of Henri Matisse," in Roger Benjamin ed, Matisse, Queensland Art Gallery, 1995, pp. 122-135.
– "Big Trouble: Daumier, Gargantua, and the Censorship of Political Caricature," Art Journal, vol. 51 (Spring 1992): 26-37
– Femmes d'esprit: Women in the Caricature of Honoré Daumier, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990 (co-edited and co-curated with Kristen Powell);
– "The Secret Agents of Satire: Daumier, Censorship, and the Image of the Exotic in Political Caricature 1850-1860," in Proceedings of the Annual Meetings of the Western Society for French History, vol. 17 (1990); 334-346.
– (edited, with Louis Provost), Honoré Daumier: A Thematic Guide to the Oeuvre, Garland Press, 1989.
– (co-authored with L. Flint) Handbook to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1986.

Her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Master Drawings, and Women's Art Journal.
Work in progress includes a book on painting and photography in fin-de-siècle Tahiti (under contract with University of California Press), and a monographic study on Gauguin (for Phaidon Press's "Art and Idea" series).
In the last year, she has lectured or given papers at New York University, the University of North Carolina, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, The College Art Association meetings, and The French Historical Studies meetings.

Professor Childs can be contacted at ecchilds@artsci.wustl.edu