UMass Boston

18th and 19th Century visual and material culture, history and theory of design and decorative arts; cross-cultural artistic contact; histories of collecting and display

PhD, Art History, University of Southern California, 2004

MA, Art History, University of Southern California, 2001

BA, Art History, Scripps College, 1995

• Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art, Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan, eds. (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
• “Mapping Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds,” co-written with Michael Yonan, in Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art, Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan, eds. (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 1-18.
• “St. Martin’s Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam,” in Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art, Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan, eds. (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 245-266.
• Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).
• “Chinoiserie: A Global Style,” in Transnational Issues in Asian Design, Christine Guth, ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 143-254.
• “Surface Contact: Decoration in the Chinese Taste,” in Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding, eds. (Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2015), 248-63.
• “Between the Mind and the Hand: Craft, Genius, and Skill in Eighteenth-Century Copybooks,” Special issue of Women’s Writing on “The Material Culture of Women’s Writing” 21:3 (Autumn 2014): 337-56.
• “Material Displays: Porcelain and Natural History in the Duchess of Portland’s Museum,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43:4 (Summer 2010): 455-472.
• “Fashioning Bluestocking Conversation: Elizabeth Montagu’s Chinese Room,” in Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors, Denise Amy Baxter and Meredith Martin, eds. (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2010), 129-148.
• “Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Material Cultures 1740-1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, Alla Myzelev and John Potvin, eds. (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2009), 19-36.
• “Picturing China: William Alexander and the Visual Language of Chinoiserie,” British Art Journal 9:2 (Fall 2008): 28-36.
• “The Grammar of Ornament: Cosmopolitanism and Reform in British Design,” Journal of Design History 21:3 (Fall 2008): 223-236.

Professor Sloboda is a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British visual and material culture, with research interests in the history of design and the decorative arts, geographies of art, and global design history. Her book Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain was published by Manchester University Press in 2014. She writes widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and design, including articles in the Journal of Design History, the British Art Journal, and Eighteenth-Century Studies. 

Professor Sloboda is currently researching artists and artisans working in and around St. Martin's Lane for a book on the geography of the London art world in the mid-eighteenth century. She is the co-editor with Dr. Michael Yonan of Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art (Bloomsbury, 2019), and is the editor of A Cultural History of Interiors in the Age of Enlightenment, 1650-1800, forthcoming in Bloomsbury’s “Cultural Histories” series.

Professor Sloboda’s has held fellowships from the Kress Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Yale Center for British Art, the American Philosophical Society, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is a member of the Editorial Board for Bloomsbury's The Material Culture of Art and Design book series and is the Specialist Reader on eighteenth-century topics for the Historians of British Art Book Prize Committee.

Courses Taught at UMB

• ART 230: Architecture, Design, and Society
• ART 235: History of Global Design
• ART 315: Eighteenth-Century Art
• ART 317: Nineteenth-Century Art