Michele Hannoosh’s interests cover a broad range of topics in nineteenth-century literature, art, and culture. She has written on the theory of parody, on Decadence, the city, and modernity with a special interest in the relations between the arts over their histories. In the nineteenth-century context, Hannoosh has worked extensively on art criticism and art theory, notably Baudelaire's essays on caricature and their place in his theory of modernity, and Delacroix's Journals as an effort to develop writing proper to painting, to a painter's response to the world.

Hannoosh has recently published a major new edition, in French and with commentary, of Delacroix's Journals, a project which has led her to consider the relations between autobiography and history: how a personal, private diary can be a particular "écriture de l'histoire." Eugène Delacroix. Journal, 2 vols.(Paris, José Corti, 2009).

Currently, she is working on a project on the relations between the writing of art and the writing of history in nineteenth-century France, focusing on the work of Jules Michelet.

Hannoosh is the faculty lead on the University's new Mediterranean studies initiative and editor of Word & Image.