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.
If you are interesting in presenting during the 2013-14 seminar, please see the Call for Proposals for instructions. Submissions are due April 1.
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 2012-13 seminar.
To attend, please read our Registration Information.
To see a listing of past seminars, please select a year below:
Seminar Schedule
“Picture Lessons: Object Teaching and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture”
Sarah Carter, Harvard University
“Awa Tsireh’s Paintings and the Art of Subtle Resistance”
Sascha Scott, Syracuse University
Commentator: Scott Stevens, Newberry Library
“A Network of Associations: Aesthetic Painting and its Patrons, 1870–1914”
Melody Barnett Deusner, Indiana University
“Risk, Speculation, and the Body Politic: The Origins of the Federalist Ideal in John Trumbull’s Portrait of General George Washington (1780)”
Matthew Fisk, University of California, Santa Barbara
Commentator: Christopher Dingwall, University of Chicago...
“Theatrical Captivity and Murder in Junius Brutus Stearns’s Hannah Duston Killing the Indians of 1847”
Lauren Lessing, Colby College
“Consuming Identities: Visual Culture and Celebrity in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco”
Amy Lippert, University of Chicago
Commentator: Sarah Burns, Indiana University
“Playing in Paris: Native American Artists and the Hand-Painted Poster”
Jessica Horton, University of Rochester
“Andy Warhol and the American Photobook”
Lucy Mulroney, Syracuse University
Commentator: Elizabeth McGoey, Indiana University