Seminar sessions are held on Fridays from 2 – 5 pm at the Newberry, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois.

This seminar provides a forum for presenting current research, as well as a venue that brings together a diverse community of local and regional Americanists for intellectual exchange, collegial conversation, and debate. We construe art history and visual culture in broad terms, embracing painting, sculpture, graphic art, architecture, and material culture as well as commercial and mass-mediated art, including illustration, reportage, advertising, caricature, comic art, photography, video, film, and other visual forms. We invite papers that cross and challenge borders both within and outside the discipline, that engage questions of methodology and ideology, probe the categories of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, and reflect critically on the state and outlook of the field.

The seminar’s co-sponsors are the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago, the Department of History and Political Science at Purdue University Calumet, The Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago, and the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Diane Dillon, The Newberry; Erika Doss, University of Notre Dame; Sarah Burns, Indiana University; and Gregory Foster-Rice, Columbia College Chicago are the coordinators for the 2011-12 seminar.

To attend, please read our Registration Information.

To see a listing of past seminars, please select a year below:

2010-2011 | 2009-2010