Biography

Born and bred in Paris, Pascale Rihouet worked in the 1980s as a teacher of French as a foreign language (in England, Germany and Paris). Throughout the 1990s, she lectured in Parisian museums and monuments as a certified tour guide and conférencière. Concomitantly, she founded a non-profit association for which she taught evening classes in art history, and designed and led trips to major artistic capitals of Europe and the American East Coast. After earning a pre-doctorate degree from the Sorbonne in 1999, she embarked on a dual PhD program at Brown University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), graduating with a PhD in art history from both institutions in 2008. Adjunct faculty at RISD since the Spring 2008, she has also taught undergraduates at Wheaton College and URI, and adult learners of Brown University’s Continuing Education. 

Academic Research/Areas of Interest

In 2009-10, Dr. Rihouet was Professor Craig Koslofsky’s research assistant for Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

For RISD, Pascale Rihouet developed a course entitled ‘Eighteenth-century French Art’ which won the Innovative Course Design competition of the ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies) in 2009. She offered ‘History of Glass’ for glass majors and others at RISD which she is now teaching at Brown University (Continuing Education). She is currently working on a proposal for an interdisciplinary course on the theory and practice of design. Co-taught with Amy Leidtke (Industrial Design), ‘The Life of Objects’ will be based, in its first phase, on the RISD museum collections.

Dr. Rihouet has just submitted (February 2011) an article on Renaissance glass and table manners (Journal of Design History). She is currently finishing an article on rituals of monastic dining in Venice. Her next major endeavor is to turn her dissertation into a book tentatively entitled “The Power of Ritual: Moving Images for Processions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy.”

Another project is to contribute to the Collaborative Translation Website of Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-1777) with translations into English of the entries on glass manufacture. Following up on this, she will research the representation of work in the accompanying plates for a future article.

Pascale Rihouet

Lecturer
prihouet@risd.edu
401-454-6572

• DEA, University of Paris
• PHD, Brown University

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