Anca I Lasc

Trained as an art and design historian of nineteenth-century France, Dr. Lasc’s publications range from articles and chapters in peer-reviewed journals and volumes to books, including Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (Bloomsbury, 2015); Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail (Routledge, 2018); Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse (Routledge, 2016); and her single-authored study Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France: The Visual Culture of a New Profession (Manchester University Press, 2018). This monograph examines how new forms of print media were used to promote the idea of the unified interior as a total work of art, enabling the profession of interior designer to take shape. In observing the dependence of the trades on the artistic and public visual appeal of their work, the book establishes crucial links between the fields of art history, material and visual culture, and design history.

Dr. Lasc’s recent projects include Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors (Routledge, 2021) and Appropriated Interiors (Routledge, 2022), two volumes that she has developed with colleagues at Pratt, which aim to bring together interior design history, theory, and practice for the first time. More recently, Revisiting the Past in Museums and at Historic Sites (Routledge, 2022) examines interventions into period rooms and historic house museums in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries – from Marxist augmented displays (marksistskaia dopolnitel’naia ekspozitsia) at Peterhof in the 1930s to the serial tv show ‘1900 House’ (aired in 1999-2000 on BBC Channel 4 in the United Kingdom and PBS in the US), from Simon Fujiwara’s appropriations of the Anne Frank House in Tel Aviv and Austria to Christmas Displays at Windsor Palace and Winston Churchill’s home.

Her latest essay, “The Dry Goods Economist and the Role of Mass Media in the Creation of a Global Window Design Aesthetic at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” was published in Design and Agency: Critical Perspectives on Identities, Histories, edited by John Potvin and Marie-Ève Marchand (Bloomsbury 2020).

Dr. Lasc currently serves as Co-President with Patricia Lara-Betancourt of the SAH Historic Interiors Affiliate Group (HIG) of which she is a founding member.

Ph.D. University of Southern California

MA University of Southern California

BA Jacobs University Bremen

BOOKS (single-author, peer reviewed)

Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France: The Visual Culture of a New Profession, single-authored monograph (Manchester: Manchester University Press, Studies in Design and Material Culture Series, 2018; paperback 2021).

EDITED VOLUMES (peer reviewed)

Revisiting the Past in Museums and at Historic Sites, co-edited with Andrew McClellan and Änne Söll (London and New York: Routledge, 2022; paperback 2023).

 Appropriate(d) Interiors, co-edited with Deborah Schneiderman and Karin Tehve (London and New York: Routledge, 2022).

 Interior Provocations: History, Theory and Practice of Autonomous Interiors, co-edited with Deborah Schneiderman, Keena Suh, Karin Tehve, Alexa Griffith Winton, and Karyn Zieve (London and New York: Routledge, 2021).

 Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail, co-edited with Patricia Lara-Betancourt and Margaret Maile Petty (London and New York: Routledge, 2018; paperback 2020).

 Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse, edited volume (London and New York: Routledge, 2016; paperback 2018).

 Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media, co-edited with Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor (London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015; paperback 2017).

ARTICLES (peer reviewed)

“The Traveling Sidewalk: The Mobile Architecture of American Shop Windows at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Design History 31, no. 1 (February 2018): 24-45.

“A Museum of Souvenirs: Adolphe Thiers, Collector of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Collections 28, no. 1 (March 2016): 57-71.

“Interior Decorating in the Age of Historicism: Popular Advice Manuals and the Pattern Books of Édouard Bajot,” Journal of Design History 26, no. 1 (February 2013): 1-24.

“Le Juste Milieu: Alexandre Sandier, Theming, and Eclecticism in French Interiors of the Nineteenth Century,” Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture 2, no. 3 (November 2011): 277-306.

BOOK CHAPTERS (peer reviewed)

“The Dry Goods Economist and the Role of Mass Media in the Creation of a Global Window Design Aesthetic at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Chapter 10 in John Potvin and Marie-Ève Marchand, eds., Design and Agency: Critical Perspectives on Identities, Histories, and Practices (London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

“Decorating with a View: The Nineteenth-Century Escapist Window,” Chapter 23 in Penny Sparke, Pat Brown, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, Gini Lee and Mark Taylor, eds., FLOW: Interior, Landscape and Architecture in the Era of Liquid Modernity (London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic 2018), 241-251.

“Paris, 1900: The Musée Centennal du Mobilier et de la Décoration and the Formulation of a Nineteenth-Century National Design Identity,” Chapter 6 in David Raizman and Ethan Robey, eds., Expanding Nationalisms at World Fairs: Identity, Diversity and Exchange, 1851-1915 (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 109-129.

“Architectures of Display: An Introduction,” co-authored with Patricia Lara-Betancourt and Margaret Maile Petty, in Anca I. Lasc, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, and Margaret Maile Petty, eds., Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 1-14.

“At Home, in the Nineteenth Century: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse,” in Anca I. Lasc, ed., Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), xvi-xxvii.

“Soft Spaces: From the Textile-Clad Interior to Modern Interior Design,” in Deborah Schneiderman and Alexa Griffith Winton, eds., Textile Technology and Design: From Interior Space to Outer Space (London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 17-30.

“French Connections: The Modern Interior and Mass Media,” co-authored with Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor, in Anca I. Lasc, Georgina Downey, and Mark Taylor, eds., Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 1-9.

“Angels and Rebels: The Obsessions and Transgressions of the Modern Interior,” in Anca I. Lasc, Georgina Downey, and Mark Taylor, eds., Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 47-58.

BOOK REVIEWS

Diana Davis, The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865 (Getty Research Institute, 2020) for Journal of Design History 33, no. 4 (December 2020): 361-362.

OTHER

“Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France,” Home Subjects (May 7, 2019): https://www.homesubjects.org/2019/05/07/interior-decorating-in-nineteenth-century-france/