Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows
2005-2006, Word & Image
Project
THE CAMERA AND THE PEN
American Literature in the Daguerreian Age
MARCY
J. DINIUS
PhD, Northwestern University
Discipline: English (American Literature)
Courses: FALL: Nineteenth-Century Literature/Twentieth-Century
Film
SPRING: Seeing and Believing in Nineteenth-Century American
Fiction
Prof. Dinius is working on a book
manuscript entitled "The Camera and the Pen: American
Literature in the Daguerreian Age," which offers
a unique comparative analysis of early photography and
the written word as they were produced in America between
1839 and 1855. Her work addresses notable lapses in the
existing scholarship by examining the earliest discussions
of daguerreotypy in America (which predated the arrival
of any actual images), the differences between daguerreotypy
and subsequent phases of photography, and daguerreian
representations in antebellum American literature.
The Camera and the Pen is framed by an account of the
relation between visual and literary representation before
the introduction of daguerreotypy to America which understands
the invention of photography as a bridge between, rather
than a rupture of, the manual and mechanical arts. With
this project, Dinius hopes to make substantial contributions
to the study of American literature and culture, interdisciplinary
media studies, and word and image theory by considering
several things: the role of the earliest stages of photography
in the simultaneous professionalization of, and rivalry
between, science and the arts in antebellum American society;
early photography's fundamental evolutionary dependence
on the written word in its American practice; and the
way in which this moment in the history of the representational
arts is evidence of the untenability of totalizing theories
of iconology.
Project
GRAPHIC ART
Alphabetic Image in Ancient Greece
ALEXANDRA
PAPPAS
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Discipline: Classics
Courses: FALL: Parties, Poetry, and Pots: The Ancient
Greek Symposium
SPRING: Communication Arts: Speaking and Writing in Ancient
Greece
The earliest known examples of the
ancient Greek alphabet reveal its intimate association
with the visual arts. Dr. Pappas exlores the evolving
relation between ancient Greek literary and material worlds
spanning the 8th–1st centuries BCE, including vivid
poetic descriptions of physical objects, physical objects
decoratively inscribed with poetic verses, and the competitive
relation between author and artisan.
As this study highlights, the Greek alphabet was inherently
visual. Inscriptions on vases and sculptures from the
archaic period (8th–6th c. BCE) communicate through
their legible meaning and their appearance simultaneously.
Euripides and other playwrights from the 5th century BCE
placed letters and words on the stage as a visual spectacle,
to be seen both in the mind's eye and in the round. And,
in the 3rd century, hellenistic poets invented a new poetic
genre, the technopaegnia (epigrammatic pattern poems),
which created both poem and image on the page. Treating
these alphabetic images as "graphic art," Dr.
Pappas challenges the distinctions between ancient Greek
word and image and argues that the ancient alphabet was
used for image-making and traveled fluidly between literary
and material worlds.
Project
LOOKING AT ARTISTS' MANIFESTOS,
1945—1965
STEPHEN
B. PETERSEN
PhD, University of Texas at Austin
Discipline: History of Art
Courses: FALL: Spiegel Freshman Seminar: Contemporary
Art in Context, The Venice Biennale 2005; SPRING: Dada
and Surrealism: The Sleep of Reason
As public declarations of intention, printed manifestos
offered a critical outlet for artists' ideas in the 20th
century, serving as both rhetorical and visual statements
of position in the art world and in society. As a genre,
manifestos involve text, graphic design, and the rhetorical
presentation of artistic ideas in a social context, thereby
intersecting with art, publicity, criticism, and advertising.
Dr. Petersen examines European manifestos from the 1950s
and early 1960s as instances of verbal and visual communication,
and as objects in their own right. His study emphasizes
the visual aspect of manifestos, focusing on the postwar
period in which they increasingly entered into the field
of international mass communication.
The postwar European artistic milieu, that of the so-called
neo-avant-garde, was one in which manifestos, both group-
and individually authored, experienced a notable renaissance.
Petersen analyzes the history of the manifesto and its
Italian nationalist roots in particular, beginning in
the 19th century and extending into the 20th century with
the Futurist movement and the many other historical avant-gardes
who defined themselves in printed statements. How did
these printed statements, rife with rhetoric, publicly
play out alliances and rivalries in the shifting and sometimes
contentious postwar art world? And, ultimately, how did
the manifesto fit into international postwar popular culture?
Project
THE DEVOTIONAL IMAGE IN 13TH-CENTURY
FRANCISCAN SPIRITUALITY AND THOUGHT
LYNN
RANSOM
PhD, University of Texas at Austin
Discipline: Art History
Courses: FALL: The Art of the Medieval Book; SPRING:
Seeing Words/Reading Pictures: The Devotional Image in
Medieval Art and Thought
While the contributions of the Franciscans
to the development of devotional art have been well documented,
especially in Italy tho less so in the north, little attention
has been paid to the relation between the highly visual
aspect of Franciscan devotional literature and the art
produced under the influence of Franciscan thought and
practice. The 13th century witnessed the rising influence
of the Franciscan order as a dominant force in lay spirituality,
an influence that was spread through direct contact with
the laity and through the devotional literature which
the Franciscans wrote and lay audiences read. As the popularity
and influence of the Franciscans grew, the 13th century
also saw a striking rise in the level of participation
of the laity in artistic patronage, much of which was
devoted to religious art reflecting various aspects of
Franciscan ideology. Dr. Ransom is considering the intersection
of word and image in Franciscan devotional art, literature,
and practice of that period.
Expanding on her dissertation, in which she analyzed the
devotional images contained in an illuminated manuscript
known as the Verger de soulas, or the "Orchard of
Solace," Dr. Ransom investigates the degree to which
Franciscans influenced the production of devotional art
in the late 13th century, in particular, the ways in which
Franciscans used iconography and 'theorized' the concept
of the image in their art and literature. Dr. Ransom examines
the use of imagery in various artistic media and in literature,
focusing on the works of the 13th-century Franciscan theologian
St. Bonaventure, to reassess the larger context of devotional
art and the ways Franciscan ideology shaped the viewing
and reading process.
Project
FASHIONING AMERICANS
Transnational Commodity Culture and the Rise of Fashion
Nationalism in the United States, 1870—1920
MARLIS
E. SCHWEITZER
PhD, University of Toronto
Discipline: History
Courses: FALL: Beyond the Cover Girl: Representations
of Gender, Race, and Class in American Magazines, 1890-2005;
SPRING: Imagining the American Woman: Textual and Visual
Representations of Women in the United States, 1860-2006.
PUBLICATION: Schweitzer, Marlis (2009). When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
"Fashioning Americans"
is a study of how the perceived "invasion" of Paris fashion
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries facilitated
the development of American national identity as expressed
through the bodies of white, middle and upper class women.
Scholars working in gender and American studies have recently
expanded our understanding of transnational relations
by identifying the body as an important contact zone,
a place where the foreign and the domestic meet, and where
national identities emerge in direct response to and in
collaboration with transnational influences.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American women
continued to act as midwives in the birth of the United
States' empire by embodying "Americanness" in art, literature,
and public life. The idealized American Girl became an
image that could be packaged and sold to Americans to
bolster a sense of national identity at home, and used
to promote "Americanness" in foreign lands. Yet just as
the Unites States military celebrated victories on foreign
shores, an altogether different form of international
conflict was brewing on domestic soil. American women,
those protectors of the home and the nation, were obsessed
with Paris fashion and dressed, not in American clothes,
but in gowns designed by French 'dilettantes'. More than
a site for displaying a unique, foreign commodity then,
women's bodies became public stages for dramatizing a
collision between the foreign and the domestic, the Old
World and the New, France and the United States. |
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