Alum Maxfield Fulton is awarded the 2022 Francis Blanchard Prize for Outstanding PhD Dissertation in Art History

Maxfield Fulton ’08 graduated with a degree in art history and English and went on to study art history and film at Yale University after doing master’s work in English at Portland State University (MA 2012). Last spring (2022) he completed his dissertation, “The Melodramatic Unconscious: The Cinematic Afterlife of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” which was awarded the Francis Blanchard Prize for Outstanding PhD Dissertation in Art History. Focusing on the films of Max Ophuls, Liliana Cavani, Nicolas Roeg, and Stanley Kubrick, Fulton’s dissertation uncovers an important “alternative tradition of modernist melodrama … though Ophuls, Cavani, Roeg, and Kubrick all made decisively political films throughout their long careers, each of them turned to melodrama and to fin-de-siècle Vienna in order to make their most apolitical or micro-political works. In these films, they discovered – and celebrated – the ‘melodramatic unconscious,’ the erotic and aesthetic impulses that undergird melodrama’s manifest moral polarities” (2).