Professor Melissa Percival

Professor Melissa Percival is Professor of French, Art History and Visual Culture in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies. She is a specialist in the art, material culture, literature and ideas of eighteenth century France. Currently she holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2023-25). 

Academic background

Melissa Percival grew up in Nottingham and did her undergraduate degree in French and German at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She returned to Cambridge to write an interdisciplinary PhD on facial expression in the Enlightenment period. For much of her career she has worked at the University of Exeter and was promoted to a Personal Chair in 2017. She has held visiting positions at the University of Tübingen, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, the University of California Santa Barbara, and the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès. 

Research

Melissa Percival's research interests include: discourses and visualizations of the human face; physiognomy and theories of character in the Enlightenment; history of the emotions; portraiture; the aesthetics of pastiche and caprice; imagination and fantasy in painting; French printed textiles- indiennes and toile de Jouy.

Among her publications are: Physiognomy and Facial Expression in Eighteenth-Century France (1999), Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater's Impact on European Culture (2005), and Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure: Painting the Imagination (2012). In 2015-16 she co-curated the exhibition 'Ceci n'est pas un portrait': figures de fantaisie de Murillo, Fragonard, Tiepolo at the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse. Her most recent book is Fancy in European Visual Culture, (2020) in the series Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Melissa's latest research on French printed textiles is profiled here.

Teaching

Melissa Percival teaches on Exeter's undergraduate degree programmes in both Modern Languages and Art History and Visual Culture. She offers a variety of interdisciplinary and research-led modules, for example on 'the face' and on private life in the eighteenth century, as well as contributing to core French language teaching.

She supervises PhD students on topics connected with the eighteenth-century and also French painting and visual culture. She would be happy to talk to any prospective research students who are interested in working in these areas.