Fellowships Awarded
The Swann Foundation Fellowship program at the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division in Washington, D.C., has awarded study grants since 1999. The National Stereoscopic Association Research Fellowship began awarding grants in 2022. This list of funded projects indicates the impressive breadth of research topics that can be explored through the Library’s collections. Many Swann Fellowship lectures are recorded and are available to watch through the Library website.
2024
Volcanic Matter: Land Formation and Artistic Creation.
Olivia Armandroff, Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Southern California. Armandroff’s work examines how artistic depictions of geological concepts of formation, sedimentation, and destruction have been used to represent the volcanic island chain of Hawaiʻi over time. In their verisimilitude, stereographs of Kīlauea from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries captivated armchair travelers and placed commercial photography in conversation with contemporary currents in landscape painting. Armandroff’s residency at the Library will allow close study of stereographic materials, as well as access to relevant manuscript and textual materials.
Moral Panic and New Technology across Time.
Dr. Rebecca Hackemann, Professor of Photography at Kansas State University. Hackemann’s research analyzes and examines the tropes and visual language conventions used to depict changing technologies through photography to apply historical interactions with technology to the present day. The fellowship will allow study of the Library’s deep holdings of photographs, stereographs, and prints that depict new technologies from the 1870s to the 1960s and social reactions to these inventions in newspapers and other print media. In addition to proposed publication Hackeman aims to incorporate the results of her research in creation of an active VR environment from historical stereographs.
"Transness is a prayer for something better": Trans world-making strategies in comics/zines.
remus jackson, Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Florida, Gainesville. jackson intends to use the Library's Small Press Expo comics collection in the Serials Division to understand how trans artists use “imagetexts” to build a future free from structural violence and one in which intergenerational trans memory exists. In addition to comics and zines, they will use books from the Rare Book Division to understand the development of physiognomy, as well as depictions of gender and nonconformity in cartoon art from the 19th and 20th centuries in the Prints & Photographs Division.
Irish Visual Culture, Social Conflict, and Crisis (c. 1840-1900)
Dr. Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Professor in the School of Art History & Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. The work focuses on the intersection of two phenomena: innovations in visual technology and mass media from the 1840s, including stereoscopy, and episodes of social and political crisis like famine, poverty, emigration, and struggle that defined Irish experience across the long 19th century. The fellowship will allow Mark-Fitzgerald to develop a chapter on emigration through stereographs of Ireland and accompanying guidebooks by American publishers marketed to a diasporic audience as a vehicle for nostalgia and reconnection with one’s homeland. In addition, Mark-Fitzgerald will consult the Library’s extensive textual holdings on stereoscopy not available in Ireland.
Seeing Expansion: Representation in the Visual Culture of the Late Russian Empire.
Ksenia Un, Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Visual Studies at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Un examines how stereotypical representation of different racial and ethnic groups in the expanding Russian empire reinforced difference starting in the 19th century. She argues that the reduction of such groups of people to stereotypes restricted how satirists and illustrators portrayed them. She intends to make use of the Hecht Bilderbogen Collection, Winokur-Munblit collection of the Russian Empire postcards, British cartoon prints, and the American humor magazine, Puck.
Cosmopolitanism, Intermediality, and Graphic Modernism: Zhang Guangyu and his Contemporaries.
Felicity Xiaojian Yin, Ph.D. candidate in Art History, Theory and Criticism at The University of California, San Diego. Yin examines cartoons and illustrated magazines between World War I and World War II, with emphasis on the influence of the West on cartoonists working in Shanghai and the influence of non-Western artists on artists working in the West. She is particularly interested in the modernist cartoonist Zhang Guangyu (1900-1965) and his interaction with Mexican cartoonist Miguel Covarrubias. She intensely examines Zhang Guangyu’s role in transforming printing and artistic practice in China.
2023
Frederic E. Ives and Color Stereoscopic Photography.
Rachel Lee Hutcheson, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University examined the Frederic Eugene Ives and Herbert Eugene Ives Papers in the Manuscript Division at the Library in September 2023. Hutcheson’s dissertation explores epistemological shifts in the understanding of early color photography (1890-1920) within contemporaneous scientific and social debates. Frederic Ives was a pivotal figure in the development of color stereoscopic photography and the technology for its presentation through projection.
Subterranean Fire: Artificial Illumination in Underground Photography and Images of the World Under Water
Isabelle Lynch, a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted research for “Subterranean Fire: Artificial Illumination in Underground Photography and Images of the World Under Water,” the third chapter of her dissertation, Flash Light: Photography and Artificial Illumination c. 1839-1939. Her work explores the practice of nineteenth century subterranean photography and its parallels to western expansion through the materials extracted from the earth that made artificial illumination possible. During her fellowship in September 2023, Lynch studied the Prints & Photographs Division’s collections of artificial light stereographs of Mammoth Cave and textual and photographic material in the Frances Benjamin Johnston collection documenting her exploration of the caverns.
The Interpersonal Relationships Among 19th Century Photographers: Ard G. Emery, Brainard F. Childs, Charles D. Cole and Christian B. Brubaker
Lynn Marie Mitchell, an independent researcher and former archivist for the National Park Service and Western Archeological and Conservation Center, conducted research in October 2023 and March 2024 for, “The Interpersonal Relationships Among 19th Century Photographers: Ard G. Emery, Brainard F. Childs, Charles D. Cole and Christian B. Brubaker." Mitchell utilized the Library’s photographic, manuscript, and newspaper collections and the records of the US Copyright Office to identify primary source materials on Ard G. Emery, Brainard F. Childs, Christian B. Brubaker, and Charles D. Cole, four photographers from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan who knew each other and worked together for over fifteen years.
The Tools of Breast Cancer: From Torture Devices to Curative Aides.
Zoe Copeman, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park, intends to use the Library's British satirical print collection and books in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division to understand a new surgical identity that emerged in the nineteenth century. She argues that during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries visual media across disciplines—oil paintings, medical texts, and popular caricatures—transformed the understanding of the surgeon (and his tools) from quackery to curative. Recording available.
Love with a Mission: War World II and Womanly Duty.
Sydney Heifler, a Ph.D. candidate in History at The Ohio State University, in Columbus, examines the role that the Writers’ War Board played in establishing the romantic themes that writers could include in comic books, women’s romance publications, and confession magazines, before romance comics even appeared on the market. She argues the Board, a civilian organization led by writer Rex Stout, encouraged plots which featured women supporting the war effort (by working in the factories and taking on jobs men left behind) and finding true love and happiness, while suggesting that those who did not found misery. Her project focuses on one chapter of her larger dissertation, Visualizing Pleasure: Selling Domestic Containment to Women During the Post-World War II Era.
Covarrubias’ Crossings: Art, Science, and the Global Politics of Ethnographic Image-Making.
Rodrigo Salido Moulinié, a Ph.D. candidate in History at The University of Texas at Austin, examines the interaction of Al Hirschfeld’s and Covarrubias’ sketches of Bali with Margaret Mead’s photographs and reports, as well as Covarrubias’ and Winold Reiss’ drawings of Harlem with W. E. B. Du Bois’ vision of how African Americans should be represented in the 1920s. He will examine the Miguel Covarrubias Collection and other Library of Congress materials to decenter Euro-American narratives of modernism, arguing that these seemingly fragmented artistic movements were a shared search for authenticity, culture, and truth.
2022
Expanding Borders: Nation-building, Colonialism, and the 3-D Image in the Nineteenth Century
Meg Hankel, a PhD Candidate in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, conducted research at the Library in March 2023 for “Expanding Borders: Nation-building, Colonialism, and the 3-D Image in the Nineteenth Century,” the second chapter of her dissertation, The Magic of 3-D: A History of Stereoscopy in Art and Visual Culture, which examines the legacy of stereoscopic images in popular media and artistic practice. Hankel studied holdings of stereographs from the four major geologic surveys of the American West during the 1870s to investigate how the three-dimensional image served the purpose of nation-building.
Exhibit Supply Company of Chicago (ESCo) commercial stereographs
Eric Kurland, a stereographic filmmaker and founder of 3-D SPACE: The Center for Stereoscopic Photography, Art, Cinema, and Education, studied the relationship between commercial stereographs and motion pictures between 1900 and 1935. While at the Library in late-April and early-May, 2023, he researched sequences of stereographic cards submitted for copyright registration by the Exhibit Supply Company of Chicago (ESCo), a producer of images for coin-operated penny arcade stereoscopes that operated a studio in Los Angeles, CA, that featured silent film era actors as stereograph subjects. Kurland conducted additional research in the Library’s Moving Image Research Center on related motion picture films.
Racialized Performance in Narrative Stereoviews of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries
Melody Davis, Professor of Art History at Russell Sage College, researched images for “Racialized Performance in Narrative Stereoviews of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries,” an analysis of depictions of race in the history of narrative stereography between 1860 and 1910. During her fellowship in June 2023, Davis explored stereoscopic tropes, such as blackface minstrelsy, food as a racialized subject, and notions of the body as a “part object,” where specific body parts become focal points of caricature and stereotyping. Davis also examined the Library’s holdings of sheet music illustrations, ephemera, cartoons, advertisements, and trade cards to locate additional iterations of this subject matter.
Greening the Gutters: Visualizing Environmental Disaster and Youth Eco-Activism in Children's Comics.
Brianna Anderson, a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, Florida, intends to use the Library's posters, cartoon drawings, small press comics, and zines to understand the way in which visual culture engages audiences and inspires them to action. She argues that academics have underappreciated the aesthetics of cartoon art in regards to environmental issues, but that it serves as a pedagogical resource for K-12 educators and scholars. Recording available.
Building Black Manhattan: Architecture, Art, and the Politics of Respectability, 1857-1914.
Jessica Larson, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in New York City uses published cartoons, maps, and visual ephemera to bridge archival gaps. Her research involves the architecture of charitable and reform institutions built to serve Black aid recipients in such Manhattan neighborhoods as the Greenwich Village area known as Little Africa, the Tenderloin, and San Juan Hill, between the American Civil War and World War I. Recording available.
2021
Aesthetic Migration in Global Women's Comics: Tracing Shojo Poetics in Chile, Mexico, and the United States.
Camila Gutiérrez, a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and Visual Studies at Penn State traces the concept of girlhood in Japanese, Spanish, and English print culture, especially comics. She argues that comic strips and cartoons from the West informed Japanese shojo and that Mexican and Chilean cartoonists have adapted shojo in comics about queer love, using a visual vocabulary developed by Japanese artists. She intends to study comic strips created by women, especially those who contributed to the development of the art form in the United States.
Battle Grounds: Painting, War, and Witness in American Visual Culture, 1861-1901.
Ramey Mize, a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania, examines artistic representations and challenges of three wars: the U.S. Civil War, the Black Hills War, and the Spanish-Cuban-American-Filipino War. Introducing the term “witness work” to understand the agency of art in bearing witness to geo-political violence in the Americas. She will investigate examples of nineteenth century works in the Swann Collection, Cabinet of American Illustration, and Documentary Drawing collections in conjunction with war photography from the period. Recording available.
2020
Composing Multimodal Comics: Images, Text, and Material Possibilities.
Allison Bannister, an MS/ Ph.D. candidate in Communication and Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic University, in Troy, New York, focuses on analyzing decisions made by artists in creating cartoons and the production of comics in her project. She utilizes varied methods including research from cognitive science, composition studies, and multimodal design, close text reading, interviewing cartoonists, and creating her own comics. She plans to explore examples primarily in the Swann Collection, Small Press Expo Collection, and other Library holdings of small press comics formed by artists' self-submissions.
Harlequins of Empire: Staging Native Identity in British Imperial Art circa 1776.
Dr. Monica Hahn, an Adjunct Professor, at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University examines representations of indigenous peoples within the global orbit of the eighteenth century British Empire in her book project. She contends that transcultural exchange and hybridization found in visual and written records warrants rethinking how networks of power operated within the structure of colonialism. Her plans to study portrayals of indigenous people in “high” and “low art” in the British Cartoon Prints collection will strengthen her previous research into such popular media as games and toy theaters.
Lecture “The Peregrinations of Harlequin Mungo: Jamaican Performances of Race in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire,” August 10, 2022. Recording available.
Transborder Anarchism: Modern Art and Visual Culture in Greater Mexico, 1890-1940.
Dr. Rosalía Romero, a Chau Melion Postdoctoral Fellow in the Art History Department at Pomona College, explores the influence of anarchism on the development of modern art in Mexico, the U.S., and broader Americas in her book project. Analyzing artworks in radical and anarchist newspapers across Mexico, the U.S., and Brazil, she traces the production, circulation, translation, and later reproductions of political cartoons and caricatures across the Americas. She will investigate examples of such late nineteenth and early twentieth century works in the radical press of the United States in the Swann, Fine Prints, Popular Graphic Art, and American Cartoon Prints collections.
Lecture, “Anarchism, Revolutionary Art, and the U.S.- Mexico Border, 1910-1920,” July 18, 2022. Recording available.
2019
The Comics Code Authority--Mass Media Censorship in Postwar America.
Richard D. Deverell, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the State University of New York, Buffalo, focuses on the Comics Code Authority as a case-study of mass media censorship. Building on the work of historians who have addressed the moral panic that gave rise to the CCA in 1954, Deverell investigates the life and eventual decline of the Authority in 2011 and will analyze key holdings in the Library's comic book collection and consult correspondence from Frederic Wertham's papers in seeking to fill a gap in the historiography of comic books in America.
Lecture “Challenges to the Comics Code Authority and a Glimpse into the Comic Arts Collection (Online Office Hours),” August 18, 2020.
De-mock-ratiyya: Humor, History, Protest, and Conflict in Algeria, 1988-2005.
Dr. Elizabeth M. Perego, an Assistant Professor of History at Shepherd University, examines how Algerians employed humor to express powerful ideas regarding the armed conflict between the Algerian government and various Islamist rebel groups. She argues that such humor that includes a rich body of cartoons, attested to the globally informed and creative ways that Algerian civilians rejected bloodshed and struggled for survival amid a conflict marked by random violence. She will explore periodicals and other works in the Near East section of the Library's African and Middle East Division. Publication based on research now available: Humor and power in Algeria, 1920 to 2021.
Parliamentary Alchemists and Electric Colossi: Scientific Imagery in Sir John Tenniel's Punch Cartoons.
Grayson Van Beuren will investigate how caricatures and cartoons by contemporaries and colleagues of Victorian cartoonist John Tenniel used medievalism in their political cartoons and focus particularly on the intersection of gothic and scientific themes. In exploring drawings and prints in the Prints and Photographs Division, he aims to determine whether Tenniel was an outlier in his use of medievalist or gothic imagery, how his peers used such imagery, and whether his use of such themes was transitional. Van Beuren completed an M.A. in Material Culture and Public History in 2016, at Virginia Tech University.
2018
Muybridge’s Children: Comics as Technologies of Time and Space at the Turn of the Century
Joshua Kopin, a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, analyzes how comics coalesce in the United States as a distinctly mass, modern, and popular form at the end of the nineteenth century. He argues that as comics diverged from caricature and cartoon, they came quickly to close vast distances and bridge distinct moments in time. He further observes that this can be seen in the formal debt that comics owe to the chronophotographs of Edweard Muybridge. He will explore collections in the Prints & Photographs, Serials & Government Publications, and Rare Book & Special Collections Divisions.
“Comics in 19th Century Time and Space,” April 09, 2019.
Pulp, Politics, and Popular Culture: Lianhuanhua in the People’s Republic of China
Chihho Lin, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, examines Lianhuanhua, a comic genre that emerged in the early 1900s in China as an inexpensive form of urban entertainment that the Chinese Communist Party came to use as a vehicle for didacticism and propaganda. Most research on this genre emphasizes its general development and political implications that accrued to it in the Maoist era. Lin will research the social history of the genre, its production, circulation and the canonization of iconic examples that will demonstrate how these comics reflected and contributed to complex interactions between politics and art. She will investigate materials in the Asian Division and American comic books in the Serials & Government Publications Division.
Between Subject and Type: Representing Free African Americans in Antebellum Portraiture
A doctoral candidate in the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania, Jill Vaum notes that increased visibility of free African Americans in the civic, economic, and social life of northern antebellum cities engendered frequent representation in genre paintings, minstrel shows, and the pictorial press. She contends that caricatures of free black life, political cartoons responding to abolitionist activity, and mass distribution of minstrelsy ephemera shaped the way antebellum portraiture could be rendered or understood. She will mainly research scenes of free black labor and urban life, music covers, and minstrel posters in the Prints & Photographs Division collections.
Laughter in the Crucible: Policing American Political War Cartoons, 1945-1965
Brandon Webb, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Concordia University in Montreal, observes that during the height of Cold War anxieties in the 1950s, instruments of exclusion were raised most bluntly against marginalized voices as a prevailing political culture stifled leftist expressions of dissent throughout various media, including editorial cartooning. According to Webb, a close reading of Cold War era cartoon and comic art reveals an industry in flux due to twin pressures of anticommunism and the changing economics of newspaper publishing. He contends that many leading cartoonists of the era represented in P&P buttressed the status quo by supporting norms that restricted the range of critique within the medium.
2017
Picturing Modernity: Modernism and Graphic Narrative.
Olivia Badoi, a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University examines the relationships among the genres of the woodcut novel, the graphic novel, and the modernist novel and contends that when placed in dialogue alter our understanding of both modernist and contemporary fiction and visual culture. She turns to exemplary works in the Prints & Photographs Division including wood engravings and blocks for Prelude to a Million Years by Lynd Ward, Karl Marx’s Capital in Pictures by Hugo Gellert, and scratchboard drawings for Flood! A Novel in Pictures by Eric Drooker in order to explore the intersection of visual and literary storytelling in order to pursue insights into the formal and thematic development of modernist and contemporary graphic narratives.
Victorian Values and Social Realism: The Visual Culture of the Progressive Era in New York City, 1890-1920.
Kelsey Gustin, a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University, investigates depictions of the immigrant working class in turn-of-the-century New York as a visual culture constructed by and for an urban middle class. She contends that such imagery, which encompasses fine art, photography and political cartoons, reveals how artists rendered perceived threats of capitalism through styles of realism. Gustin will study the political cartoons by Annie “Lou” Rogers in the full set of the Birth Control Review, a magazine established by Margaret Sanger that ran from 1917 to 1940, in addition to the Margaret Sanger Papers, and social realist cartoon in the Goldstein Foundation Collection.
Monument on Paper: Transatlantic Radical Left and Politics of Memory (1871-1914).
Asli Menevse, a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at Cornell University researches depictions of monuments in late nineteenth century caricatures from Europe and America, approaching them as translations of an authoritarian mode of representation. She contends that these caricatures are products of a critical engagement with the inherent qualities of the monuments, which they magnify visually through aesthetic means such as the grotesque and carnivalesque, modes that would be recognized by viewers. She will explore collections that focus on the Siege of Paris and the Franco-Prussian War, the Swann Collection of Caricature and Cartoon and Cabinet of American Illustration, in addition to radical periodicals in order to recover alternative visions of commemoration imagined in these cartoons that counter official forms of commemoration.
Visual Culture and the Creation of National Identity during the Mexican War.
Erika Nelson Pazian, a doctoral candidate in the History of Art, at The Graduate Center at New York University examines the visual culture of the Mexican War (1846-48) in order to better understand how citizens in both warring nations viewed themselves, their enemy, and their nations. She will investigate cartoons and caricatures relating to the war, in addition to satiric periodicals, comic and military lithographs, broadsheets, and song sheets. She contends that despite the vastly different circumstances of each nation in the years before the conflict, the need to unite citizens behind their government and military led visual culture producers in both nations to adopt similar visual strategies to foster a sense of national identity. Ideas of territory, difference, and race figure prominently in popular imagery that proved influential on both sides.
Lecture “Villains to Be Vanquished: Envisioning the Enemy in the U.S.-Mexican War,” June 21, 2018.
2016
Art, Commerce, and Caricature: Satirical Images of Artistic Life in Paris, 1750-1850
Kathryn Desplanque, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University employs social and cultural approaches in researching French caricature in her dissertation. Her study highlights such themes as the shifting status of the artist, visual tropes of the French Revolution, aesthetic debates (i.e. Classicism versus Romanticism), and the impact of the art critic and connoisseur on the artist’s autonomy. She plans to explore the collections of French and British political cartoons in the Prints & Photographs Division in expectation of adding to the 600 visual satires she has thus far selected for analysis and will utilize qualitative data analysis software.
Shadows Cast: German Comics after 1989 and the Legacy of East German Practice
Elizabeth Nijdam, a doctoral candidate in the Department of German Languages and Literature, at the University of Michigan, researches the impact of unification on German comics in her dissertation. Focusing on Anke Feuchtenberger and Henning Wagenbreth, two important figures trained under the doctrines of socialist realism, she notes that both drew on such East German sources as socialist theater, Soviet poster design, and German expressionism, to develop original strategies that moved German comics into a new realm. She further contends that such American alternative and underground comics as Raw magazine, proved essential in these artists’ development.
“The Comics of Anke Feuchtenberger & Their Many Expressionisms,” April 28, 2017.
2014
Producing and Litigating Satire, 1670-1792
Andrew Benjamin Bricker, a postdoctoral fellow in English at McGill University, will investigate a shift in satire in the second half of the eighteenth century, when changes in British libel laws made printed political and personal satire legally precarious. He contends that, at mid-century, satire begins to migrate to new media, and especially caricature and visual satire, and plans to study the wealth of examples held at the Library of Congress and executed by key British satirical artists who offered personalized, nasty, and popular critiques of their often well-known human targets.
Pulp Empire: Comic Books, Cartoons, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1941-1955
Dr. Paul Hirsch, an instructor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, examines the dissemination of and impact made by millions of American comic books and cartoon booklets from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s. He contends that these popular publications, whether uncensored commercial or government-sanctioned, worked to define, for a global audience, what it meant to be American—and thus presented American policymakers with both an opportunity and a challenge. The American government met this challenge through a combination of repression and co-optation.
Politics, Punishment, and Prestige: Images of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and the States Party in the Dutch Republic, 1618-1672
Maureen Warren, a doctoral candidate in art history at Northwestern University, analyzes works of art about domestic political disputes in the Northern Netherlands during the seventeenth century. The artists creating such work used caricature and satire to mock politicians and religious leaders in Dutch and German news prints and illustrated broadsides including the Hauslab Album, a collection of prints that depicts European armed conflicts from 1566-1711. Study of the Hauslab imagery and Dutch prints will contribute to Warrren’s goal of contextualizing later examples of Dutch political art.
2013
Editorializing the Cold War: Cartoons and Commentary on Nuclear Fear and Anxiety,1945-1989
Alexandra Boni, a doctoral candidate in history at George Mason University, aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of cartoons relating to Cold War nuclear anxiety by three nationally syndicated cartoonists (Herbert Block (Herblock), Paul Conrad, and Frank Miller) in the context of their cartoons' embedded contents and related articles and letters to the editor in the main newspapers that published their work (The Washington Post, the Denver Post and Los Angeles Times, the Des Moines Register, respectively). She will apply close readings and new digital methodologies in her study.
Remembering the Veteran: Disability, Trauma, and the American Civil War, 1861-1915
Erin Corrales-Diaz, a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of North Carolina, will examine the ways in which American illustrators, cartoonists, artists and photographers used the figure of the disabled veteran to explore the trauma and violence of the American Civil War. She will focus on the work of Thomas Nast, Joseph E. Baker, and other artists, in addition to little known or anonymous illustrators in the pictorial press. Analyzing such a broad range of imagery will show how the figure of the veteran permeated many forms of American visual culture.
“Empty Sleeves & Bloody Shirts: Disabled Civil War Veterans & Presidential Campaigns, 1864-1880,” August 14, 2014.
Pictures of Change: Transformative Images of Gender and Politics in the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1776-1920
In her dissertation, Allison Lange, a doctoral candidate in history at Brandeis University, will explore the use of publicly circulating imagery in the woman suffrage movement in America. First examining late 18th century conventions for representing gender, the project then investigates how suffragists used newspaper cartoons and illustrations, photographs, and other imagery to promote their movement, which ended with women winning the vote in 1920.
Burke and Britons: Edmund Burke and the Irish Other in Eighteenth Century Cartoons
Johnathan M. Pettinato, a doctoral candidate in history at Fordham University, traces the rising tide of chauvinism and xenophobia in late 18th century Britain through examining cartoons of the era that portrayed Edmund Burke as a foreigner in close proximity to the British political establishment. Scurrilous cartoons that caricatured him as an 'other,' an un-British threat to Britain and its empire, often drew upon stereotypes of the Irish and Jesuit priests. The project will benefit particularly from consulting the Library's cartoons not in the British Museum Catalogue.
Making a Scene: Movida, Comic Books, Punk Rock, Anti-authoritarian Youth Culture, and Creating Democratic Spaces in Franco's Spain, 1955-1984
In his dissertation, Louie Dean Valencia, a doctoral candidate in history at Fordham University, examines how young Spaniards living under Francisco Franco's dictatorship subverted the régime in their everyday lives by reading American comics, despite government attempts to interdict such activity. He suggests that exposure to such comics that conveyed democratic, pluralistic, and proto-feminist ideals contributed to Spanish youths' rejection of fascist ideology as evidenced in comics they produced in the mid-1970s that critiqued the régime.
2012
Salon Caricature in Paris, 1840-1881
Julia Langbein, a doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Chicago, will focus primarily upon studying caricatures of paintings that were displayed in the Paris Salon, the annual or biennial state-sponsored display of high art. When examined across such journals as La Petite Lune, L'Eclipse, Le Journal Amusant, Le Charivari, Le Grelot, and L'Assiette au Beurre, the practice of Salon caricature forms a 40-year corpus of fascinating, revealing graphic satire. Langbein aims to shed light on a misunderstood, little studied type of caricature and to re-assert the importance of this art form in the history of this central institution in nineteenth century French art.
Lecture “How to View an Exhibition from a Hot-Air Balloon: Nadar at the Paris Salon,” Wednesday, May 1, 2013. Recording available.
Darkology: The History of Amateur Blackface Minstrelsy and the Making of Modern America, 1860-1965
Rhae Lynn Barnes, a doctoral candidate in history at Harvard University, is creating a bibliographic database of amateur minstrel show guides and related publications as a key element of her study. As she catalogs these materials, which include cartoons of black life in America, Barnes will analyze how the cartoons' tropes and characters changed over time in relation to black freedom struggles and increased during the Jim Crow era. In addition to holdings in Rare Book and General Collections, Barnes will also explore performing arts posters, manuscripts and organizational records relating to amateur minstrel shows.
Red Dilemma: Totalitarian Spectacle and the Inception of the Cultural Cold War in American Art 1939-1949
Jill E. Bugajski, a doctoral candidate in Art History at Northwestern University, will investigate graphic art and exhibitions in America in the context of its shifting relationship with the Soviet Union. She contends that the 1940s saw a radical graphic transformation of the USA-USSR paradigm, which revolutionized the political role of artists who created imagery to be conveyed in the form of political posters, didactic portfolios, pamphlets, and printmaking. Such artistic strategies came to render traditional forms of American propaganda obsolete.
History: Palestinian Political Cartoons, 1948 to 2009
Sadam Issa, a doctoral candidate in African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will examine how Palestinian political cartoons published in three Palestinian newspapers, Filastin (Palestine), al-Quds (Jerusalem), and al-Hayat al-Jadidah (The New Life), visually narrate the history of Palestine from the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 to the Gaza War of 2009. He argues that this imagery provides insight into Palestinian history, especially in relation to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and thus can serve as a pictorial form of Palestinian national narrative.
Anti-Semitism and Anti-modernism in France: 1918-1940
Emilie Anne-Yvonne Luse, a doctoral candidate in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University, plans to study imagery relating to abstraction and representation in conservative French interwar periodicals including Le Figaro, l'ami du people, l'�cho de Paris, Ric et Rac, Le Journal Amusant, Candide and Gringoire. Her project will explore how critiques of modern art and its markets during the interwar years functioned as a platform for anti-Semitism in France.
2011
"Drawing the Lines of Innocence: Representations of Childhood in Early American Comic Strips, 1896-1920"
Lara Saguisag, a Ph.D. candidate, in the Department of Childhood Studies, at Rutgers University, will focus on “kid strips,” or comic strips that featured child protagonists in her research into why the child became a popular subject in early American comics. She will study features by such cartoonists as R. F. Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, Lyonel Feininger, and Winsor McCay, whose works are well represented in the Library’s extensive holdings. Saguisag will analyze how such comic strips at once reflected and shaped contemporary beliefs and anxieties about childhood.
“Sketching the Secret Tracts of the Child's Mind: Theorizing Childhood in Early American Fantasy Strips, 1905-1914,” March 29, 2012.
"Agit-plakat: Political Posters of the Thaw (1956-1967)"
Masha Kowell, a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, will explore a body of official Soviet political satire produced by the publishing house Agit-plakat in the late 1950s-1960s. As an official player in the process of de-Stalinization, this publisher facilitated the transformation of caricature into a vehicle for previously forbidden stylistic diversity and formal experimentation. Kowell will focus on the Library’s holdings of the Soviet humor magazine Krokodil and many Soviet posters in her comparative and contextual study of Agit-plakat iconography.
"Russian Caricature and Art Criticism 1850-1910"
Dr. Margaret Samu, a lecturer in the Education Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will pursue post doctoral research on the parallel development of art criticism and caricatures about art in Russia from 1850 to 1910. During this turbulent period of artistic and social reforms, caricature in Russian periodicals became a significant outlet for voicing opinions on the state of the art world. Samu will draw on the Library’s strong holdings of Russian satirical and political periodicals in her study, the first to address caricatures on art, in contrast with most work which has focused on political caricature.
"Drawing Down the Nation: Reviving Folklore and Social Justice Through Comics in India"
Jeremy Stoll, a Ph.D. candidate in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, will research how contemporary Indian artists combine regional folklore with comic book format to produce visual narratives to convey to mass audiences the urgency of social change arising from industrialization and globalization. He will study examples of contemporary and recently published Indian comic books and the American roots of these works in the Library’s extensive comic book collections.
2010
“William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor and Other Doubtful Enterprises”
Leora Maltz-Leca, an assistant professor of contemporary art, history of art and visual culture at the Rhode Island School of Design, analyzes the animated cartoons of Kentridge, a widely acclaimed South African artist working today. In his distinctive creative process, he continuously draws and erases schematic subjects on a single charcoal drawing, all the time taking photographs of his changing drawing. Film narratives that he produces from his photographic records often feature stock characters or caricatures of apartheid-era stereotypes that Maltz-Leca contends relate to earlier European traditions of political caricature and plans to explore that connection.
Lecture “William Kentridge: ‘Stone Age Drawing,’ Cartoon Logic and South Africa’s Process of Change,” Thursday, April 21, 2021. Not recorded.
“Real Talk: Interrogations of Blackness and Whiteness in African American Post-Soul Visual and Popular Culture”
Jeffreen M. Hayes, a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the College of William and Mary, will investigate African American cartoonists who challenge and broaden notions of blackness while commenting on political and social structures in white America. African American cartoonists from 1930 to 2009 who have been selected for her study and most of whom are represented in the Library’s collection include Oliver W. Harrington, E. Simms Campbell, Brumsic Brandon, Keith Knight, Darrin Bell, and Aaron McGruder.
2009
"Pushing Out Islam: Cartoons of the Reform Period in Turkey (1918-1928)"
Yasemin Gencer, a doctoral candidate in the history of art at Indiana University, analyzes Turkish political cartoons during the decade of reform. In cartoons from this period that is critical to the history of modern Turkey, she identifies symbols of Turkish modernism that contrast with traditional symbols of Islam and Arabic culture. She notes that textual and visual elements reinforce one another in the imagery, which can be seen as evidence of a new Turkish Republic seeking to distance itself from its Islamic past.
Lecture "Cartooning Progress: Secularism and Nationalism in the Early Turkish Republic (1922-28),” June 1, 2010. Not recorded.
"Anglicizing the French Revolution: The Politics of Humor in Late Eighteenth-Century English Political Graphic Satire"
Amanda Lahikainen, a doctoral candidate in the history of art at Brown University, investigates ways in which British political satirists used the French Revolution to represent and comment upon English domestic politics from 1789 to 1804 (from the fall of the Bastille to Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor.) She will focus on works by Isaac Cruikshank, James Gillray, Richard Newton and Thomas Rowlandson, all represented in the Library’s superb collection of British satirical prints.
"The Artist as Reporter: Picturing the News at PM Daily, 1940-1948"
Jason Hill, a doctoral candidate in the history of art at the University of Southern California, examines the place of cartooning within the visual repertoire of PM Daily, from 1940-1948. The editorial independence and sophisticated visual program that characterized this newspaper attracted many of the era’s most celebrated artists, including Charles E. Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Arthur Szyk and Theodore Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss.)
2008
"Transatlantic Encounters: Franco-American Exchanges in the Civil War and Reconstruction era."
Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire, a doctoral candidate in art history and archaeology at Columbia University, explores the influence of French academic painting traditions on the work of Thomas Nast, a predominant 19th century American political cartoonist, who collected prints of such leading French painters as Paul Delaroche and Jean Léon Gérôme.
Lecture “The Artist as Translator: Thomas Nast and French Art,” March 25, 2009. Not recorded.
"A Colorful Union: Patriotic Caricature and Characterization in Henry Louis Stephens’ Civil War Chromolithographs"
Mazie Harris, a doctoral candidate in the history of art at Brown University, analyzes the vacillation between caricature and characterization in two chromolithographic series created by Henry Louis Stephens, with the aim of clarifying his struggle to portray race relations as a motivation for the Union cause.
Lecture “A Colorful Union: The Development of Union Patriotism in Henry Louis Stephens’ 1863 Chromolithographs,” December 8, 2008. Not recorded.
"'Transatlantic Realms': The Idea of America in the British Literary Imagination"
Jared Richman, a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, investigates prints in the Library’s collection of British satires as a means of illuminating the conceptual treatment of America during the period before, during, and after the Revolutionary War.
"A Nabob’s Progress: Graphic Satire, The Grand Master and British Excess, 1770-1830"
Christina Smylitopoulos, a doctoral candidate in art history and communication studies at McGill University, strengthens the broad art historical context for the figure of the nabob (a provincial governor in the Mogul empire in India, also often a person of great wealth or prominence) by conducting research in the Library’s outstanding holdings of British satires.
"Dangerous Domestics: Satirical Depiction of Wives in English Prints from 1745 to 1821"
Veronica White, who completed her doctorate in art history at Columbia University in the summer of 2008, initiates a postdoctoral research project on identifying and analyzing the varied artistic treatments of married women during the Golden Age of British satire through exploration of the Library’s rich collection.
2007
"Where Have You Gone, Miss Columbia? American Identity and Uncle Sam's Forgotten Partner."
Ellen Berg, an affiliate assistant professor in the department of history at the University of Maryland, researches the emergence and rise of Miss Columbia as a national symbol in political cartoons and other popular visual imagery from the colonial period through the 19th century and World War I, after which, she contends that Americans’ relationship with this beloved symbolic figure changed.
Lecture “Where Have You Gone, Miss Columbia? American Identity and Uncle Sam’s Forgotten Partner,” March 5, 2008. Not recorded.
"Routine Extremism: Ad Reinhardt and American Art"
Prudence Peiffer, a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at Harvard University investigates modernist painter Ad Reinhardt's little-known cartoon collages of Adolph Hitler published in the leftist journal The New Masses and PM newspaper and his "How to Look at Modern Art" cartoons published in Art Journal and argues that his earlier overlooked work shaped the formation of his unique system of radical aesthetics.
Lecture “How to Look at Ad Reinhardt’s World War II Cartoons in America,” March 18, 2008. Not recorded.
2006
"‘Cultivating Dreamfulness’: Fantasy, Longing, and Commodity Culture in the Work of Winsor McCay"
Katherine (Kerry) Roeder, a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Delaware, analyzes cartoonist virtuoso Winsor McCay’s work in relation to his times, specifically in relation to absorption with dream and fantasy in the rapidly expanding consumer culture of early 20th century America.
Lecture “Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy and Mass Culture in the Work of Winsor McCay,” January 16, 2007. Not recorded.
"Caricature representations of Irish-American immigrants during the 1830s-1860s"
Dr. Sharrona Pearl, Lecturer, Committee on Degrees in History and Literature, Harvard University, draws on her training in the history of science and her expertise in physiognomy to explore caricature representations of Irish immigrants in the United States before, during, and after the Irish potato famine.
Lecture “Black and White: Drawing the Irish-American Immigrant in Shades of Grey,” May 15, 2007. Not recorded.
"Staging the Page: Graphic Satire in Eighteenth Century England"
Hope Saska, doctoral candidate in the history of art at Brown University, investigates the relationship between caricature and theater in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain by developing the idea that printed satires were “theatrical” representations and that such prints played a role in forging general character types as well as caricatures of recognizable individuals.
Lecture “Of Attitude and Action: William Hogarth and the Art of Gesture,” April 10, 2007.Not recorded.
2005
"Romeyn de Hooghe and the Birth of Political Satire" *
Meredith Hale, a doctoral candidate in art history at Columbia University, acknowledges that the origins of political cartooning are often associated with prints produced in 18th century England by artists such as William Hogarth and James Gillray. She contends, however, that the earliest stages of the genre can be found in the late 17th century in the northern Netherlands in the work of Dutch printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708). In her study of his large, beautifully executed prints she explicates de Hooghe’s political satires that combine striking imagery and texts that comment on both foreign and domestic events of his day.
Lecture "Romeyn de Hooghe and the End of the Absolute Monarch," May 10, 2006. Not recorded.
2004
"Contemporary Graphic Narratives: History, Aesthetics, Ethics"
In research for her dissertation, Hillary Chute, a doctoral candidate in English at Rutgers University, focuses on historically based graphic narratives such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Joe Sacco’s Palestine and employs narrative and visual theory and postmodern literary theory in order to illuminate how they are powerfully political and aesthetic works. She argues that the flexible architecture of these and other postmodern graphic narratives’ pages, their consonant and sometimes dissonant verbal and visual narratives embody, theorize, and dramatize the issue of representation itself.
"The Many Faces of Edward Gorey"
Amy Robin Hoffman, a candidate for a master’s degree in English at the University of Connecticut, explores Gorey’s dual roles as a writer and artist, investigates his work in caricature, and gives special attention to the artist’s portrayals of himself.
"Studies in Landscape Representation: Interrelations and Interdependencies"
Nicole Tucker Keith, a candidate for a master’s degree in landscape architecture at the Harvard School of Design, proposes an analysis of how artists’ representations of landscape in comics work within their sequences of imagery and how such representations relate to landscape architects’ approaches to landscape in their drawings.
2003
"Embracing the Specter of Communism: The Art and Activism of Hugo Gellert" *
In doctoral and post-doctoral research on Hugo Gellert (1892-1985), American muralist and graphic artist, James Wechsler centers on the area of cartoon and caricature in this long overlooked artist’s life and art. In the first major study of Gellert’s life and work, Wechsler incorporates research on drawings and prints in the Library’s Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Foundation Collection and Willner Collection of graphic art. He completed a doctorate in art history at the City University of New York in 2003.
Lecture "Black and White and Red All Over: The Caricatures and Cartoons of Hugo Gellert," April 7, 2004. Not recorded.
"Osamu Tezuka: Manga as a Site of Inter-Art Discourse in Postwar Japan (1945-1960)"
Natsu Onoda, a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, examines the early works of Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989) in her analysis of manga’s development during Japan’s postwar era in relation to the cultural, social, and political climate of the time. Tezuka is commonly identified as the inventor of modern manga.
2002
"‘Il bello dal deforme’: Form and Subject in Seventeenth Century Italian Caricature" *
In her dissertation research, Sandra Cheng, a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Delaware, explores the connection between artistic training at the16th century Carracci Academy in Bologna, the contemporary curiosity in the monstrous, and the beginnings of caricature in modern Italy. Cheng’s research entailed study and analysis of early caricaturists’ work in rare prints housed in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division and the Rare Books Division.
Lecture “Perfect Deformities: The Carracci, Science and Early Modern Caricature,” October 7, 2003. Not recorded.
2001
"‘The Old Negro’: Race and Representation in Post Bellum America" *
Martha Nadel’s post-doctoral research features images of the “Old Negro” in popular visual and literary culture of the early post bellum era and the later transformation of such imagery. Nadel focused on 19th century representations of blackness, especially cartoons and caricatures published as illustrations in books and magazines, and found many relevant drawings and prints in collections of the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division. She completed her doctorate in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in 2000.
2000
"Germs, Genes, and Dissent: Images of Radicalism and Disease in the Construction of American National Identity" *
Chloe Burke, a doctoral student in history at the University of Michigan, employed political cartooning and other visual media in her dissertation research to interrogate the ways that discourses of illness and health were integral to the construction of modern American identity in terms of health and fitness, and radicalism as disease and degeneracy. Her analysis of bold cartoon drawings in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division’s collections supported points made in her dissertation. Burke completed her doctorate in 2004.
1999
"The Limits of Irreverence: Irony and Liberal Satire in American Culture, 1950-1964" *
Stephen Kercher’s dissertation explores American cartooning during the Cold War era and includes analyses of work by luminaries such as Herbert Block (1909-2001), Walt Kelly (1913-1973), Bill Mauldin (1921-2003), Al Capp (1909-1979), and Robert Osborn (1904-1994). Kercher studied examples from the Library’s significant holdings of these cartoonists’ original work in his research when he was a Ph.D. candidate in both History and American Studies at Indiana University. Lecture "Positive Uses of Anger: The Art and Politics of the American Postwar Satiric Cartooning," on Thursday, June 15, 2000. Not recorded.
"Caricature and Artistic Identity: Peggy Bacon"
As a PhD candidate in art history at Case Western Reserve University, Sara F. Meng aimed through her dissertation research to produce the first detailed biography of Peggy Bacon (1895-1987), a leading American caricaturist of the 1920s and 1930s, whose artistic achievement in its cultural context, has, until recently has been overlooked. The Library holds original drawings, prints, and other materials by and about the artist.
"The Arts of Abolition: Enlightenment, Agitation and Representation in Britain, 1765-1807"
Sarah Parsons, a doctoral candidate in the history of art and architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, focused her dissertation research on imagery by creators of “high art” and popular graphic art during public debates in Britain on slavery, the slave trade, and black personhood. Relevant to this is the Library’s outstanding collection of British satires, one of the finest assemblages of these rare prints in North America.