Nineteenth Century Modernities Colloquium Program

An interdisciplinary discussion of modernity
in the global nineteenth century

Friday April 2
University Club of the Indiana Memorial Union

1:00 pm Michael Leja (Art History, University of Pennsylvania), “Problems in Early Mass Visual Culture”

Michael Leja studies the visual arts in various media (painting, sculpture, film, photography, prints, illustrations) in the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily in the United States. His book Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (2004) traces the interactions between the visual arts and the skeptical forms of seeing engendered in modern life in northeastern American cities between 1869 and 1917. It won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize in 2005. He is currently at work on a book exploring changes in pictorial forms and in social relations associated with the industrialization of picture production and the development of a mass market for images in the mid-nineteenth century.

2:45 pm Jan Goldstein (History, University of Chicago), "Political Affiliations of the Flesh in Nineteenth-Century France."

Jan Goldstein’s research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of Europe, especially France, from the 18th through the 20th centuries. Much of her work has concentrated on the psychological sciences and on the ways that socio-political forces unexpectedly shape our understanding and experience of our innermost selves. Her most recent book, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850, examines a literal politics of selfhood, tracing the competition among three psychological theories that all made bids for institutionalization in the French state educational system: sensationalism, phrenology, and the philosophical psychology of Victor Cousin.

4:15 pm Jane Thrailkill (English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina), "Darwin's Children: Henry James, Stephen Crane, and the Art of Immaturity"

Professor Thrailkill works on Nineteenth-Century U.S. and English Literature and Science Studies. Her most recent book, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism, offers a new understanding of American literary realism that draws on neuroscience and cognitive psychology. She positions herself against the emotionless interpretations of the New Critics and takes as her point of departure realist works of medicine, psychology, and literature, arguing that nineteenth-century readers and critics would have taken it for granted that texts engaged both mind and body.

Reception: 5:30-6:30 Faculty Club

Saturday April 3
Walnut Room in the Indiana Memorial Union

9:30 am Ruth Rogaski (History, Vanderbilt University) “The 19th Century as a Crisis of Qi”

Ruth Rogaski is a historian of Qing and modern China, with allied interests in the history of medicine, urban history, women’s and gender history, and social and cultural history in early modern and modern East Asia. She is the author of Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2004), which traces how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hygienic Modernity was awarded the Fairbank Prize in East Asian history, the Levenson Prize in Chinese studies, the Welch Medal in the history of medicine, and was co-recipient of the Berkshire Prize.

11:00 am Swati Chattopadhyay (History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara), “Mapping a Mobile Land: Landscape and Governance in Colonial India."

Professor Chattopadhyay is an architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and the cultural landscape of British colonialism. She is interested in the ties between colonialism and modernism, and in the spatial aspects of race, gender, and ethnicity in modern cities that are capable of enriching post-colonial and critical theory.. She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005), and co-editor of a special issue of PostColonial Studies (Nov 2005) focusing on “the subaltern and the popular’.

1:30 pm Lara Kriegel (History, Florida International University), "’A New Order of Valour’: The Victoria Cross, the Crimean War, and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Modernity”

Professor Kriegel is the author of Grand Designs, a prehistory of the Victoria and Albert Museum and study of the design reform movement of mid-nineteenth century Britain. Working jointly in social and cultural history, she has taught course on, or published work on, topics including museum history, woman’s history, print culture in imperial Britain, and World War I. Her current work concerns the Crimean War, the cultural production and cultural formations around this military action, and its role in shaping popular and academic notions of Victorian character. Her book received Honorable Mention in the 2007 Albion Prize competition for best book in British History since 1800; one of her essays won the 2005 NAVSA Donald Gray Prize for best essay in Victorian Studies. She’ll be joining the IU faculty as a joint appointment in the History and English Departments next year.

3:00-4:00 pm Roundtable with
Sarah Burns (Art History, Indiana University)
Michael Dodson (History, Indiana University)
Rebecca Spang (History, Indiana University)

Sponsored by the College Arts and Humanities Institute, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Departments of Art History, English, and History