Europeans, Remembrance of the American Civil War, and Black Art Today

Mentor Areas

American History and Politics (Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow South);
History of Art in Europe and the United States;
Cinema and Media Studies;
Monuments and Commemoration;
Black Literature, Art, and Performance; and
Francophone and Germanic Studies.

Description:

I am writing a book titled Listening to Panoramas. In this book, I argue that commemoration does not only pertain to markers, common soldier monuments, and equestrian statues. I make the claim that large-scale panoramic forms were important for Civil War remembrance in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Invented in 1787 by the English painter Robert Barker (1739–1806), panoramas gave audiences around the world the opportunity to immerse themselves in stories about natural and urban landscapes as well as bloody battle scenes depicted on larger-than-life circular paintings. In my book, I paint a picture of a broader global fascination with painted panoramas in the long nineteenth century that extends to art forms created until today. Between 1883 and 1890, battle panoramas of the American Civil War were created by European painters to commemorate Gettysburg, Shiloh, Atlanta, Second Bull Run, Missionary Ridge-Lookout Mountain, Virginia vs. Monitor, and Vicksburg. That these works of art influenced so many Americans can be explained in part because the media and performance culture created for these attractions reached even more Americans than the paintings themselves. I show that the panorama keys and guidebooks, articles in newspapers and magazines, live performances and audio recordings of lectures, short films, audio guides, political speeches, and fundraising campaigns organized by municipal authorities and private associations all document how these paintings were integrated into commemorative traditions as they were invented and reinvented since the nineteenth century. Importantly, I highlight the memory work of Black artists (Mark Bradford, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker) in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries who demonstrated the lasting power of the panoramic form for reckoning with the legacies of the American Civil War.

Preferred Qualifications

good reading and writing skills in English, German, and/or French;
research skills needed to create bibliographies and format manuscripts;
retrieval, download, and/or scanning of articles, book chapters, images, and video from libraries, special collections, archives and online resources;
willingness to skim newspaper and journal articles published to identify subject matter related to specific research questions; and
interest in learning more about literature, visual culture, the American Civil War, and research on race, gender, and sexuality