About

Heather Belnap is Professor of Art History & Curatorial Studies and Coordinator of Global Women’s Studies at Brigham Young University.

She has presented and published widely in feminist art history, and particularly on women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art, fashion and society. Recently, she has turned her attention to the fields of Utah and Mormon studies. Professor Belnap is the author, with Corry Cropper and Daryl Lee, of Marianne Meets the Mormons: Representations of Mormonism in Nineteenth-century France (University of Illinois Press, 2022), winner of the John Whitmer Historical Association’s Best Book Award. A French translation of this book, titled Mormonopolis: Imaginaire français du mormonisme 1830-1914, will be published by the Université Paris-Sorbonne in 2026. In addition to numerous articles and essays, she has co-edited two books, Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914 (Ashgate, 2011) and Women, Femininity, and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914 (Routledge, 2014), with a third volume, Women in Public Goes Global: A Reconsideration of Femininity and Public Space in 19th-Century Visual Culture, 1789-1914, in the works.

Dr. Belnap is currently involved in several projects, including her book manuscript, Modernity’s Muses: Women, Art, and Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris. Her contributing essay for the upcoming exhibition Un vestiaire à soi: Féminités dissidentes au XIXe siècle (Paris, Palais Galliera, 2026) focuses on the influence of military wear on women’s fashion. She is also working on a volume on artist Minerva Teichert for the University of Illinois’s Introductions to Mormon Thought series and a book and exhibition project tentatively titled, Artistic Frontiers: Women and the Making of the Utah Art Scene, 1880-1940 (with Emily Larsen). Her digital public history initiative, the Utah Women in the Arts Project, will go live in the fall of 2026.

Professor Belnap teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, women in art, fashion in art. modern and contemporary art, and women’s studies. She received the university’s Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Award (2023) and the BYU College of Humanities Scheuber-Veinz Professorship and Christensen Lectureship for Achievement in Literature or Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Folklore, Art History, or Creative Writing (2024). She also received the student-nominated 2024 BYU European Studies Professor of the Year award.

Dr. Belnap is actively engaged in professional and civic organizations, particularly those involved in the advancement of women in the visual arts. She has served as the chair of CAA’s Services to Historians of the Visual Arts Committee (2021-2024) and as a member of the CAA Committee on Women in the Arts (2015-2018). She is the Utah representative for The Feminist Art Project and has served on the Utah Women and Leadership Project‘s Arts & Music Impact Team. Dr. Belnap was honored in Jann Haworth’s Utah Women 2020 mural as one of 250+ women past and present who have shaped the state’s culture. She currently serves as the treasurer of Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture.

She can be contacted at heather_belnap@byu.edu or womeninart@gmail.com