Acknowledgments

I am overwhelmed by the kindness, mentorship, and support of my advisors and mentors who have become my colleagues and my friends. I will do my best to thank all of them here.

Thank you to Stéphane Roy, my first friend and mentor in the field of eighteenth-century studies, whose kindness and erudition is known to all who have met him. Thank you to Neil McWilliam, to whom I will always go for wise and light-handed insights that magically transform the very foundations of my thinking every time he so judiciously shares them. This book is deeply indebted to his considerate questions and encyclopedic knowledge. To the late Mary D. Sheriff, the original rockstar of eighteenth-century studies, thank you for showing me and all of us that we can be rebellious in academia. And to Olga Grlić and Keith Luria, I am so grateful to you for making me feel like family.

Everything about this book has benefited tremendously from the time, consideration, friendship, and mentorship given me by esteemed scholars in my field who have truly shown me what it is to support academic community. Patricia Mainardi, Dominic Hardy, Andrew Clark, Peggy Davis, Jessica Lynn Fripp, Elizabeth Mansfield, Ersy Contogouris, Cynthia Roman, Mitchell Frank, and Brian Maidment, I will never know how I came to deserve your friendship and your support but I promise to pay it forward.

I would not be a digital humanist if it were not for the pluck, the enthusiasm, the machinations, and the ambition of the late Hans J. Van Miegroet. I am so fortunate to have been one of the students he took under his wing. Deepest thanks to Eric Monson, Angela Zoss, Charlotte Clark, Hannah Jacobs, and Brooke Andrade who have warmly guided and encouraged my explorations in the digital humanities and laid the foundation for my practice.

I am especially grateful to my generous colleagues in France for their mentorship early in my research. Thank you to Laurent Baridon, Martial Guédron, Anne LaFont, Thierry Laugée, Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel for giving me their time, their advice, and their support. And deepest thanks to the conservators of the Département des Estampes et Photographie at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) without whom this project would have been impossible: Corrine Le Bitouzé, Rémi Mathis, and Valérie Sueur-Hermel. Deepest thanks to the late W. McAllister Johnson in particular, whose unique collecting practices, erudition, and generosity indeed planted the seed that ultimately grew into this book.

I could not have completed this work without the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Humanities Center, the Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon, and the Lewis Walpole Library. Thank you to UNC Chapel Hill’s Digital Services librarians and the School of Data Science and Society for respectively creating and funding the production of our adjoining Omeka S and Carolina Digital Repository Inglorious Artists database. UNC Chapel Hill has been an abundant and supportive home for my research thanks to the support and guidance of generous mentors who have shown me they believe in me. Thank you Annette Lawrence, Jeff Spinner-Halev, Elizabeth Engelhardt, Terry Magnuson, Corbin Jones, Stan Ahalt, Sibby Anderson-Thompkins, and Amanda Henley for modeling heartfelt leadership. This gorgeously illuminated book was made possible by the generosity of Annette Lawrence, and UNC Chapel Hill’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities and School for Data Science and Society. While writing this book, I fell deeply in love with libraries, such as the site Richelieu of the BnF, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenale, the Musée Carnavalet, and the Musee de la Revolution Francaise, in a way I hope to someday repay. Thank you to Kc 164 for waiting for me to find you, and to the unknown librarians who constituted these folios.

Thank you to my peer reviewers for their stupendous feedback, which deeply improved this book, and to my invited manuscript workshop participants for their conversation, feedback, and time: Patricia Mainardi (could I ever thank you enough?), Martin Myrone, and Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer. To the faculty at my former doctoral program in Duke University’s Art, Art History, and Visual Studies program, especially Sara Galletti, Sheila Dillon, Stanley Abe, and Gennifer Weisenfeld, thank you for your warmth and your support. And to my friends and former doctoral colleagues Elisabeth Narkin, Katie Jentleson, and Iara Dundas, thank you for your friendship (and the friendship of your children).

I would never have made it through the fourteen years between the inception and completion of this project without the love, care, and enduring friendship of my loved ones who have held me through so much and helped me rebuild myself too many times. Thanks to my parents Dawn and Kelvin Desplanque, my sister Alexandra Desplanque, and our dog Caylus Desplanque. To my friends Erik and Jen Mykster-Iino, John Felix Arnold III, Gabe Anderson, Deva Nirguna, Olivia Johnston, Haley Krall, Cari Leslie, Erin Kaltenbrun, Tim Morris, Iain Soder, Hannah Taylor-Johnson, Jamie Muise, Dana Passmore, Mike and Geoff at the Green Room, my rink fam at United Skates Raleigh, and every dog I’ve befriended: thank you so much.