Patricia Leighten
Professor Emerita of Art, Art History and Visual Studies

Patricia Leighten received her PhD from Rutgers University. Her field of research is late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century art and politics in France, and the history of photography. She has won numerous awards and fellowships. The first art historian to publish a study of the importance of the anarchist movement for the development of twentieth-century modernism, in Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897−1914 (Princeton University Press 1989); she extensively expanded on this subject in The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris (University of Chicago Press 2013). She is also co-author, with Mark Antliff, of A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914 (University of Chicago Press 2008), trans. Le cubisme devant ses contemporains–Documents et critiques (1906-1914) (Paris: Les Presses du réel, 2019) and Cubism and Culture (Thames & Hudson 2001), trans. Cubisme et culture (Paris: Thames & Hudson, 2002).  She is currently researching photography and anarchist ideology in the 20th century, and presenting her scholarship at conferences and in publications.

Current Appointments & Affiliations

Contact Information

  • 114 S. Buchanan Blvd., Duke University, Durham, NC 27708
  • Box 90766, Durham, NC 27708-0766

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