Featured Speakers

Featured speakers include Nancy Armstrong (English Department, Duke University),
Julie Codell (School of Art, Arizona State University),
and Shawn Michelle Smith (Visual & Critical Studies, Art Institute of Chicago), and Jerry Spagnoli, photographer.

NANCY ARMSTRONG, Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English, Duke University
Nancy Armstrong teaches courses in the novel, eighteenth and nineteenth-century literatures and cultures in English, and critical theory, and she serves as editor of the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction, a position she has held since 1996. Armstrong has devoted her career to explaining how novels imagine a world that can be inhabited (or not) in specific ways by historically and culturally variable readerships. Her first book, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 1987) argued that domestic fiction written by, for, or about women first imagined the forms of courtship, marriage, and household that serve as the conceptual units of the modern liberal state. Currently underway is a book on the literary continuities that define Darwin’s theory, sensation fiction, sentimentalism, and Hardy’s naturalism as a single, distinctively late Victorian reconception of the line between animal and human life.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

  • How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism 1719-1900 (Columbia University Press, 2005).
  • Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Harvard University Press, 1999).
  • The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life, co-edited with Leonard Tennenhouse (University of California Press, 1992).
  • Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 1987).
  • The Future of the Human, co-edited with Warren Montag. Special issue of differences 20.2-3 (2009) .

JULIE CODELL, Professor, Art History, School of Art, Arizona State University
Julie Codell teaches courses in Victorian culture, the British Empire, and film. She is an affiliate in English, Film and Media Studies, Center for Asian Research, and Gender and Women's Studies. Her research areas are Victorian culture, the Victorian press; Indian culture under the Raj; life writings in Britain and India; colonial photography; Indian travel narratives; material culture and world film. She was Interim Director of Film and Media Studies at ASU in 2010-2011. She has published in journals in literature, art history, film and Asian studies and has edited special issues of Victorian Periodicals Review (1991 on Victorian artists and the press; 2004 on the press in 19th-c. India) and the Journal of Visual Resources (2010-11).

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

  • Transculturation in British Art, 1780-1930, editor (Ashgate, 2012).
  • Power and Resistance: Photography and the Delhi Coronation Durbars, editor (Mapin, 2011).
  • The Political Economy of Art, editor (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008).
  • Genre, Gender, Race, and World Cinema, Encounters in the Victorian Press, co-editor with Laurel Brake (Palgrave, 2004).
  • The Victorian Artist: Artists' Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870-1910 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
  • Imperial Co-Histories, editor (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003).
  • Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, co-edited with Dianne Macleod (Ashgate, 1998), now being translated into Japanese (Hosei University Press, 2014).
  • Images of an Idyllic Past: Photographs of Edward S. Curtis (exhibition catalogue, 1988).

SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH, Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Shawn Michelle Smith teaches courses in the history and theory of photography and the visual culture of the United States.  Her interdisciplinary work focuses on gender and race in visual culture, with an emphasis on early American photography.  She has served on the editorial boards of American Literature and Frontiers:  A Journal of Women Studies, and is currently on the board of Photography and Culture.  She is a practicing artist as well as a scholar, and one of her recent photographic works deals with the much-publicized Abu Ghraib torture scandal.  Currently she is completing a book on the ways photography transformed perception in the nineteenth century, drawing new worlds into view even as it paradoxically highlighted new realms of invisibility.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

  • Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Co-edited with Maurice Wallace. Duke University Press, forthcoming.
  • Lynching Photographs. Co-authored with Dora Apel. Volume 2, Defining Moments in American Photography. Ed. Anthony Lee. University of California Press. 2007.
  • Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture. Duke University Press. A John Hope Franklin Center Book. Reprinted 2005. Phi Beta Kappa Book Award, 2005, Saint Louis University.
  • American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture. Princeton University Press. 1999.

JERRY SPAGNOLI, photographer and daguerrotypist; featured speaker in the Robert C. May Photography Series, The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky.

Jerry Spagnoli works with a wide variety of contemporary and historic photographic processes and has been influenced by such diverse pictorial traditions as Renaissance sculpture and German Romantic landscape painting. He is best known, however, for reviving the daguerreotype, one of the earliest photographic processes, first developed in the 1830s. The minutely detailed images on polished silver plates are compelling to view and devilishly tricky to produce. Spagnoli photographs his own views of contemporary history, from the crowded streets of New York to significant current events, such as the inauguration of President Barack Obama or the dedication of the National 9/11 Memorial. In a series of anatomical studies, he also explores the ways in which the daguerreotype can capture the texture of human skin.