Jordan Hallmark

Jordan’s research focuses on the decorative arts, architecture, and the design and construction of urban and landscape environments in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, with particular interests in the political culture and visual representation of gender, manufacture, and sovereignty. His dissertation, “Les Artisanes du Roi: Women Artisans and the Material Production of Sovereignty under Louis XIV,” reconstructs the community of women artisans who participated in the French crown’s ambitious programs of artistic and material production. Drawing on royal administrative records, notarial archives, and object-centered inquiry, the project examines the role of women makers in Louis XIV’s manufactories, residences, and gardens, asking how their technical knowledge and creative agency contributed to a political order organized around male sovereignty and patriarchal authority. More broadly, his research considers the relationship between design and making, the organization and representation of artisanal labor, and the movement of materials, objects, and technical knowledge across the courts of early modern Europe.

Jordan holds a BA in Art History and an MA in History from Portland State University. His earlier research on free people of color in prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue continues to inform his interest in the relationship between the material culture of absolutism and the regimes of labor and creative production that have often remained obscured in histories of early modern France. Since 2020, he has also worked as a researcher for The Feitelson / Lundeberg Art Foundation, contributing to the catalogue raisonné of twentieth-century American painter Lorser Feitelson.