Art,
Culture, and Government:
The New Deal at 75
Participant Biographies
Listed in alphabetical order
Beverly Brannan is
Curator of twentieth century documentary photography in the Prints and
Photographs Division, Library of Congress. With Carl Fleischhauer, she
is co-author
of Documenting America: FSA-OWI Photographs,
1935-1943 (1989)
and the companion traveling exhibition. She is also co-editor of A
Kentucky Album: FSA-OWI Photographs, 1935-1943 (1985)
and FSA: The American Vision (2007).
With Laura Katzman, she co-curated the exhibition A
Life in Photography: Louise Rosskam and the Documentary Tradition and
they are now collaborating on Rosskam's biography. Brannan has acquired
for the Library the personal papers of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers Jack Delano,
Arthur Rothstein, and John Vachon
and worked on the digitization of 165,000 FSA/OWI images,
as well as the online presentations for handmade photo books by Dorothea
Lange, Walker Evans, and Jack Delano. She specializes in photojournalism
as well. Her most recent project is a Prints and Photographs web guide on Women Photojournalists.
Christopher N. Breiseth is
President of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park,
New York, and President Emeritus of Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania. Prior to his seventeen years at Wilkes, Dr. Breiseth served as
president of Deep
Springs College in California (1980-83); Professor and Chair of the History
Program at Sangamon State University in Springfield, Illinois (1971-1980),
and Co-Director and teacher at the Springfield Institute on Interracial
Education
for teachers and administrators. A scholar of Abraham Lincoln,
Dr. Breiseth was also active in the NEH-funded Lincoln Sites Project
in the late 1970s, and contributed an essay, "Lincoln,
Douglas and Springfield in the 1858 Campaign," to
the published collection The Public
and the Private Lincoln. Other achievements
include a Danforth post-doctoral fellowship in Black Studies at the
University of Chicago (1970-71), an assistant professorship of history
at Williams
College (1964-71), a position as chief of policy guidance in the Community
Action Program at the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington,
D.C., and a term as President of the Telluride Association (1963-65).
Charles Camp has
a long and distinguished career as a scholar, professor and public sector
folklorist. He is the curator of the Smithsonian Institution traveling
exhibit, Key Ingredients: America by Food. He is the author of American Foodways: What, When, Why and How We Eat in America (1989) and has published widely on folklore, material culture, food, cultural
conservation, symbolic tourism, and baseball. Dr. Camp holds a Ph.D. from
the University of Pennsylvania and has a long-standing interest in the
New Deal and its impact on American culture.
Robert Clark is
Supervisory Archivist at the Franklin
Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum  in Hyde Park, New
York. He was born and raised in Denton, Texas, and received his B.A. and
M.A. History from Texas Tech University
in Lubbock. He worked as an archivist at the Southwest Collection at Texas
Tech University until 1991. He then attended law school at Syracuse University,
graduating with a Juris Doctor in 1994. Mr. Clark practiced law in New
Mexico from 1994 to 2001. He returned to the archival profession in June
2001 when he joined the staff of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential
Library as an Archivist. He was promoted to Supervisory Archivist at the
Roosevelt Library in February 2005.
Beth Cleary is Associate
Professor and Chair of the Theater and Dance Department, Macalester College,
St. Paul, Minnesota. She has an abiding interest in puppetry and performing
objects. She wrote her dissertation, and has published numerous articles,
on the Bread and Puppet Theatre and has also written extensively on contemporary
dance and dance theory. With co-presenter Peter Rachleff, she has team-taught
on the arts and the New Deal and pursued an extensive research project on
the Buffalo Historical Marionettes. As a theater director with a particular
interest in American political work, she has directed numerous works at
Macalester College, including: Naomi Wallace's Slaughter
City, In
the
Heart of America,
and The Retreating World;
Ellen McLaughlin's Tongue
of a Bird; Bertolt Brecht's Mother
Courage and her Children; Arthur Miller's All
My Sons; Clifford Odets's Waiting
for Lefty;
Langston Hughes's Limitations of Life;
and an original dance-theater adaptation of Meridel LeSeuer's Women
on the Breadlines.
Recent professional theater work has included dramaturgy for Minneapolis' Frank
Theatre and directing a production of David Gow's Cherry
Docs at the Minnesota Jewish
Theatre Company. In addition to teaching playwrighting and directing at Macalester
College this spring, she will be directing Cherrie Moraga's Heroes
and Saints.
John Y. Cole, Jr.,
librarian and historian, is founding and current Director of the Center
for the Book and Acting Director of the Publishing Office at the Library
of Congress. The Center for the Book was created in 1978
by Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin to use the resources of the Library
to stimulate public interest in books and reading. Cole has a Ph.D.
in American Civilization (1971) from the George Washington University
and has published widely about the history of books, reading, and libraries,
as well as the history and role of the Library of Congress. Most recently
he co-edited, with Jane Aikin, The
Encyclopedia of the Library of Congress: For Congress, the Nation & the
World (2004),
a 569-page, authoritative reference work. His well-illustrated
article in the Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress (1983) described the history of the Library's Federal Arts projects
of the 1930s. Three years
later, with American
Folklife Center Director Alan Jabbour, he represented the Library of
Congress in Fort Lauderdale at the Florida Center for the Book's conference, Rediscovering
the 1930s: The WPA and the Federal Writers' Project.
Through the Center for the Book and with the assistance of the American
Folklife Center and other Library of Congress divisions, he was the principal
organizer of the Library's two-day 1994 conference, Amassing
American Stuff: The Library of Congress's New Deal Arts Collections.
He plans to leave his complete set of first editions (with dust
jackets) of the state guides produced by the Federal Writers Project
to the Library's Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
Laura Katzman is
Associate Professor of Art History at James Madison University. From 1995-2007,
she
was Associate Professor of Art and Director of the Museum Studies Program
at Randolph-Macon Women's College. Other teaching posts include
a Senior Lecturership in Museum Studies at Smith College and a Guest Professorship
at the University of Hamburg. As a Visiting Curator at the Fogg Art Museum,
she co-organized a major exhibition on Ben Shahn's photography for the Harvard
University Art Museums, which later traveled to the Phillips Collection in
Washington, D.C., the Grey Art Gallery in New York City, and the Smart Museum
of Art in Chicago. The accompanying book, Ben
Shahn's New York: The
Photography of Modern Times (Yale, 2000),
which she co-authored, won London's Kraszna-Krausz
Special Commendation Award for the World's Best Books on Photography. She
also co-authored Ben Shahn and the Passion
of Sacco and Vanzetti (Rutgers,
2001), and is currently working on A
Life in Photography: Louise Rosskam and the Documentary Tradition,
which will complement an exhibition at the American University Museum and
the Jersey City Museum (2009-10). Katzman is the recipient of grants from
the Henry Luce Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution,
the National Endowment for the Humanities, the J. William Fulbright Commission,
and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery
of Art. In 2006-2007 she was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship from the Smithsonian
American Art Museum, where she pursued her current collaborative book/exhibition
project: Picturing Puerto Rico: North American Photographs
and the Making of a Modern Commonwealth.
Michael Kazin is
a professor of history at Georgetown University. His books include A
Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (2006), America
Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s,
with Maurice Isserman, (3rd edition, 2007), The
Populist Persuasion: An American History (revised
edition, 1998), and Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building
Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (1987).
He also edited, with Joseph A. McCartin, Americanism:
New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (2006).
He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow
Wilson Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian
Institution. He is currently working on Big
Dreamers: A History of the American Left,
and is editor-in-chief of The Princeton
Encyclopedia of United States Political History (in
progress). He is a regular contributor to The Washington Post,
The American Prospect, Dissent, The
Nation, The New York Times Book Review,
and other publications.
Stetson Kennedy is
a native of Florida. From 1937 to 1942, he headed Florida's Folklore
Project of the Federal Writers' Project, which conducted unprecedented
field research
that documented traditional stories, songs, occupational culture, and
many other aspects of Florida's diverse cultural heritage. The most famous
of
the folklorists who worked under Kennedy's direction was the celebrated
African American novelist and playwright, Zora Neale Hurston. Kennedy's
book, Palmetto Country (1942),
is a detailed survey of Florida folklife derived from the data he and
his Federal Writers' Project colleagues compiled. Kennedy is also known
for
risking his life to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan during the 1950s, as
an undercover agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. His book The
Klan Unmasked (1955),
tells the story against the backdrop of African American human rights. Another
important facet of Kennedy's life is the friendships he forged with prominent
writers, philosophers, and folklorists, including Richard Wright, Jean Paul
Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Marjoie Kinnan Rawlings, Studs Turkel, Alan
Lomax, Langston Hughes, Howard Fast, Alice Walker, and Woody Guthrie.
Catherine Hiebert Kerst is
a Folklife Specialist/Archivist in the American Folklife Center. She received
her Ph.D. through the Folklife Program in the American Studies Department
at George Washington University. She joined the American Folklife Center
staff in 1989 to work with the WPA California Folk Music Project Collection materials,
collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell in Northern California from 1938-1940.
In 1997, this multi-format ethnographic field collection became the first
American Folklife Center contribution to the Library's online American Memory
Project, under the title California
Gold: Northern California Folk Music From the Thirties. In addition to her research
on Cowell's New Deal folk music collecting career, Kerst is involved in
providing subject access to materials in the Division, working with Center
educational initiatives, and helping to create and develop the Ethnographic
Thesaurus, a joint scholarly initiative of the Center and the American Folklore Society.
Colleen McDannell is
Professor of History and Sterling M. McMurrin Professor of Religious Studies,
University of Utah, Salt Lake City. She received her doctorate from Temple
University in 1984. Her numerous awards include a John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Fulbright Commission's John Adams Chair
in American History to teach at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands,
and an Indo-American Fellowship for research on Christian cemeteries in India.
Her most recent publications are Picturing
Faith:
Photography and the Great Depression (Yale
University
Press, 2004) and an edited book, Catholics
in the Movies (Oxford University Press,
2007). As a part of the research for Picturing Faith, she curated a
forty-five-photograph
exhibition that
continues to travel throughout the country. Professor McDannell is also the author
of Material
Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (Yale
University Press,1995); Heaven: A History (co-authored
with Bernhard Lang; Yale University Press, second edition, 2001); and The
Christian Home in Victorian America: 1840-1900 (Indiana
University Press, 1986). Her journal articles range from interpretations of Victorian
masculinity among Irish-American Catholics to Evangelical home-schooling in contemporary
America. She is currently working on a book about the American reception of the
Second Vatican Council (Basic Books).
Mindy Morgan is
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology and Affiliated Faculty
in American Indian Studies, Michigan State University. Her research centers
on how indigenous communities within the United State view and use language
as a symbol of cultural persistence and tribal identity. She
focuses particularly on community beliefs and literacy practices in
the early twentieth century, ethnographic research within contemporary indigenous
language
programs, connections between language use and identity formation, and
the impact of federal policy on indigenous language maintenance and transmission.
Her book, "The Bearer of this
Letter":
Language Ideologies and Literacy Practices among the Fort Belknap Communities (University
of Nebraska Press, forthcoming), examines how literacy functioned as
both a cultural practice and a cultural symbol for the Assiniboine and
Gros
Ventre communities of Fort Belknap Indian Reservation during the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While conducting research for this
larger project, she discovered that a number of tribal members had been
employed by the Federal Writers' Project
in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Her 2005 article, "Constructions
and Contestations of the Authoritative Voice: Native American Communities
and the Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1941," (American
Indian Quarterly, Vol 29:1), draws on this research. She has since expanded
this study, exploring how tribal communities participated in the Federal
Writers' Program
throughout the state of Montana.
Peter Rachleff is
Professor of History at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Trained
as a labor historian, he has incorporated immigration history, ethnic
history and African American history into his research and teaching. In
recent
years, he has become increasingly interested in critical race theory and
performance studies. His publications include Black
Labor in Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1890 (University
of Illinois Press, 1989) and Hard-Pressed
in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (South
End Press, 1993), as well as articles in numerous scholarly collections
and journals.
He has served on the national board of directors of the Labor and Working
Class History Association, and as President of the Working Class
Studies Association. At Macalester, where Rachleff has taught since 1982,
he is the faculty coordinator of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
Program, and he offers courses in labor, immigration, ethnic, and African
American history. Rachleff is active in the local and national labor movement
and is a frequent commentator on labor issues for local and national media.
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Richard Remsburg speaking at the symposium. Photo by Stephen Winick, March 14, 2008. |
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Rich Remsberg is
an archival image researcher working mainly on independent films and
documentaries for PBS, including the American
Masters program
on Woody Guthrie. He has also worked on various other projects, including Johnny
Cash's At Folsom Prison, The
Banjo Project, and the Grammy-nominated
CD box set, People
Take Warning! Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs 1913-1938. His
own short film, Jeweler's Eye,
premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival, and Common
Pictures: A Journey Through the Eyes of Found Photography was
an opening act for electronic music duo, The Books, on their spring
2007 tour.
He is the author of All I Got Is Gone: Roots
Music Photographs From the Great Depression,
forthcoming
from the University of Illinois Press. Described as "eloquent photography" by
the New
Yorker, Remsberg's book, Riders
for God: The Story of a Christian Motorcycle Gang (2000),
has found an audience from Harvard University to the Texas prison
system. As a photographer, his work has appeared in The
New York Times, Newsweek.com, The Christian
Science Monitor, and No Depression. He
has served on the faculty of the Library of Congress' American Folklife
Center Field School and received several grants from the National
Endowment for the Arts.
He lives in North Adams, Massachusetts where he holds an
informal series of vintage 8mm and 16mm films on Tuesday nights (see www.atlasfilms.org
for further information).
Henry Sapoznik is
a record producer with four Grammy nominations, a radio documentarian,
an author, and a performer of traditional Yiddish and American music.
He received a 2002 Peabody award for his ten-week National Public
Radio series on the history of Jewish broadcasting, The
Yiddish Radio Project,
the 2000 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Music Scholarship for his book Klezmer!
Jewish Music from Old World to Our World,
and an Emmy nomination for his score to the documentary
film, The
Life and Times of Hank Greenberg. He founded the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archives of Recorded Sound
at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, as well as Living
Traditions' annual KlezKamp:
The Yiddish Folk Arts Program. In addition
to his pioneering efforts in klezmer music, Saponzik studied banjo
with old-time master Tommy Jarrell. His more than thirty-five recordings
include a three CD anthology on country music legend
Charlie
Poole, which was nominated for a 2005 Grammy, and the anthology People
Take Warning! Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs 1913-1938,
which was nominated for a Grammy in 2007.
John Edgar Tidwell is
is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas. He
has researched and written extensively on Sterling A. Brown, Frank Marshall
Davis, Langston Hughes, African American poetry and literature, and the
Harlem Renaissance. His many awards for research scholarship and teaching
include fellowships from National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Harvard University, and Yale University. Publications
include A Negro Looks at the South
by Sterling A. Brown (with Mark Sanders;
Oxford University Press, 2007), Montage
of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes (Missouri
Press, 2007), Writings
of Frank Marshall Davis, A Voice of the Black Press (2007), Livin' the Blues: Memoirs of a Black
Journalist and Poet (1992),
and After Winter: Selected Writings
on the Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown (with
Steven Tracy; Oxford University Press, forthcoming, January 2009).
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