Paris Spies-Gans is a historian and historian of art with a focus on women, gender, and the politics of artistic expression. She holds a PhD and MA in History from Princeton University, an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and an AB in History and Literature from Harvard University. In her work, Paris illuminates how women have navigated sociopolitical barriers to participate in their societies through multiple forms of intellectual and creative expression, even with the obstacles they regularly faced — and especially at moments of political revolution and change.
Her first book, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830, was published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in Association with Yale University Press in June 2022. It was named one of the top art books of 2022 by The Art Newspaper and The Conversation. In 2023, it received the Stansky Book Prize for the best book on British studies after 1800; the Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1600-1800; and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ Louis A. Gottschalk Prize, Honorable Mention, for an outstanding historical or critical study on the eighteenth century. It was shortlisted for the William MB Berger Prize for excellence in the field of British art history.
She is currently working on her second book, A New Story of Art (Doubleday/US and Viking/UK).
Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Yale Center for British Art, the Lewis Walpole Library, and Princeton University.
She consults on art acquisitions and attributions on a private, individual basis.
Paris serves on the the Advisory Board for the Lund Humphries book series Illuminating Women Artists and as a specialist advisor for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
