Summer 2010 – Julia Rosenbaum
Photograph from a "strip map" of the Hudson.
An NEH Summer Institute Fellowship took me to Chicago for most of the summer for research at the Newberry Library. I am working on a couple of new projects related to mapping and art (one focusing on the Hudson River and tourism in the early 1800s) and the Newberry has an extraordinary collection of European and American maps from all periods as well as rich historical materials. Chicago is also a city rich in 20th-century American art and architecture so I was also able to look closely at artwork I teach and work on. (The other great thing about Chicago is its food scene, so, as a confirmed foodie, I “studied” it very thoroughly.) Other projects that kept me busy were finalizing the text for a volume of essays on class identity that is being published this winter and writing a paper focusing on artistic responses to new mid-19thc. technologies for the Association of Historians of American Art symposium I’m speaking at this fall.
