Emma Schwak

I am a doctoral researcher in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute, Florence, where my thesis, L'opulence éclairée: Material Culture and the Social Construction of Parisian Elites from the Directoire to the Premier Empire (1795-1815), examines how taste and material culture operated as socially determining categories in a period of recomposition of the French elite.
My research focuses on the relationship between those who guided taste — the editors, architects, socialites and educators I call tastemakers — and the newly constituted Parisian elite who consumed their guidance. I am particularly interested in how taste was negotiated, and how the consumption and display of objects and garments resulted from this process. My work draws on a wide range of sources, from fashion periodicals and culinary literature to postmortem inventories and surviving objects or garments held in French and European collections.
I came to this research through an MA in Early Modern Studies at UCL, where my thesis explored fashion and intellectual history in the late Ancien Régime, and a BA in Japanese Studies at SOAS, where I worked on French Indochina.