Like his contemporary and “frenemy” Oscar Wilde, artist J.M. Whistler has left a lasting cultural legacy that has spread in many unexpected directions. He haunts 20th- and 21st-century fiction, poetry and drama. He has been the subject of recent documentary films. He even turns up in such unlikely places as the world of the culinary arts in Whistler's Mother's Cook Book.

During this talk, Professor Margaret Stetz to survey Whistler’s varied representations and to consider what has made him such a dynamic and long-lasting presence in Western imagination.

This lecture is in conjunction with the exhibition Friends and Enemies: Whistler and His Artistic, Literary and Social Circles, which will be on view during Fall 2020 and Spring 2021.

Margaret Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and a professor of humanities at the University of Delaware. In addition to books, exhibition catalogues and co-edited essay collections, she has published more than 120 essays on topics such as Victorian feminism, the politics of animated films, British modernist literature, Oscar Wilde and women writers, and neo-Victorian dress. In 2015, Stetz was named one of the top 25 women in U.S. higher education by the magazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.