Susan Hiner

Susan Hiner received her MA and PhD in French Literature from Columbia University after completing her BA in French and English (Modern Studies) at the University of Virginia. Professor Hiner’s research and teaching interests include women and material culture in nineteenth-century France, fashion studies, and the intersection of literature, visual culture, and social history. She also directs the Global Nineteenth-Century Studies Program, serves on the advisory committee of Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies, and acts as the Faculty Director of Research Development.

Professor Hiner has published articles on various aspects of nineteenth-century French culture and has received grants relating to both her current research and to curricular development. Her most recent book, Behind the Seams: Women, Fashion, and Work in Nineteenth-Century France, takes a multidisciplinary approach to the women fashion producers—both working—and middle-class – who were key to shaping the nineteenth-century French fashion economy and is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic in October 2023. Her first book, Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), about women’s fashion accessories and their relation to French modernity, won the Millia Davenport Publication Award of the Costume Society of America. She recently guest-edited a special issue of Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, entitled “Fashion’s Soft Power in Nineteenth-Century France” (2023) and co-edited a special issue of Romanic Review (2021) devoted to the work of Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson.

She has been a Visiting Fellow of the American Library in Paris (2015) and was awarded an NEH Fellowship in 2016-17 for her most recent book. Recent and forthcoming publications include “Intertextual Fashion: Influencer Journalism and the Realist Novel in Nineteenth-Century France,” Cambridge Critical Concepts, 2024), “Adèle Romany” and “Jean-François Millet” in Making & Meaning: The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (Vassar College, 2023), “When Fashion Stood Still,” in “La Commune n’est pas morte …,” (NCFS, 2021),  “Feminized Commodities, Female Communities” (French Historical Studies 2020),  “Picturing Work in the Age of Empire” in A Cultural History of Work in the Age of Empire: 1800-1920 (Bloomsbury, 2019), and “Fashion animation: heads, hats, and the uncanny work of fashion” (SUNY 2018).

You may visit the Vassar YouTube channel to view Professor Hiner’s Art Talk on Adèle Romany’s “Portrait of the Artist’s Family,” on exhibit at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Gallery. In Spring 2018, Professor Hiner co-curated, with Elizabeth Nogrady of the FLLAC and a student scholar, in collaboration with Vassar’s Costume Shop and Archives and Special Collections, a Faculty Focus exhibit revolving around women’s fashion accessories in nineteenth-century Paris. Read a review of the exhibit.