Baird Society Past Scholars

Baird Society Resident Scholars 2007

RENZO BALDASSO expects to receive his PhD in the History of Art at Columbia University in 2007. He began his graduate study in the history of science at the University of Oklahoma and transferred to Columbia University’s History of Art program. For his dissertation, which examines the role of images in the work of Renaissance natural philosophers, he will be working with many of the early printed works in both the Dibner and Cullman Libraries. His project, entitled “Botanical Illustrations and Mathematical Diagrams: An Analysis of the Different Roles of Visual Representation in the Scientific Revolution,“ and Baldasso’s unique background in both the history of science and the history of art, are aptly suited to our holdings. He intends to concentrate on early botanical illustration, but also to examine more fully our books published by Erhard Ratdolt (1442–1528) and explore works on magnetism and mechanics he has not yet had occasion to consult.

COURTNEY FULLILOVE, a PhD candidate in History at Columbia University, is currently writing her dissertation on the history of the U.S. patent system in the 19th century. Fullilove’s original approach to this topic involves an analysis of the ways that government agencies, methods of record keeping, and broader cultural influences have combined to influence the course of American history, law and knowledge. She will be using her tenure with us to further research this subject with a project entitled “Science, World’s Fairs, and the U.S. Patent Office, 1836-1876,” three themes well represented in SI Libraries’ Special Collections though seldom combined in one project. She intends to make use of our World’s Fair collections, our records of expeditions, such as the U.S. Exploring Expedition, and ethnological studies held at the Cullman Library to explore the surprising reach and influence of this government agency.

INHYE KANG is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her proposed research project, “Between East and West: Japan’s Colonial Representation at World’s Fairs,” explores how imperial Japan used its exhibitions at World’s Fairs in Europe and America in the early 20th century to transform Japan’s national identity into that of a full-fledged colonial power, positioning itself on a par with empire-building nations of the West. Kang plans to finish most of the primary research for her dissertation using the World’s Fair materials housed in the Dibner.

Baird Society Resident Scholars 2006

APRIL KISER is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She passed her qualifying exams with distinction in November 2004. Ms. Kiser obtained her BA in art history and has made the transition to history for her PhD and has received special honors from her department at SUNY-Buffalo for her outstanding work as a graduate student. Her proposed project, "'The True and Lively Figure of Every Beast:' Images in Early Modern Natural Histories," is part of her dissertation research. Her plan is to investigate the role of images in early modern science. Scientific images made their way in the face of sharp challenges to assert their authority and value within the development of early modern science and Ms. Kiser believes that we need to reconsider how we understand images historically in order to understand the work that images do, both in making knowledge and in asserting their legitimacy. Her research is part of a growing body of scholarship that is attempting to investigate the juncture between science and art, and in particular how the role of images in science is dependent on a culture's conceptions of nature and how they serve as a window into the broader visual culture of Early Modern Europe. Ms. Kiser plans to study the marvelous collection of 16th- and 17th-century natural history works that are primarily in the Cullman Library. The rich trove of works by Gesner, Aldrovandi, Jonston, Moffett, Belon, and others will be the focus of her research and provide the foundation for her dissertation. The Cullman Library's works on exploration and travel narratives will also assist her analysis of the role of pictures in knowing about the world and nature.

Baird Society Resident Scholars 2005

JANE CAREY Carey is an Associate Lecturer in Gender Studies at Victoria University and a Research Officer in the Australian Women's Archives Project of the University of Melbourne. Her research field is in history of women, gender and science, and the gendered construction of whiteness, which ties in with her proposed research project at SIL: "Promoting Whiteness: Visions of Western Femininity at the World's Fairs, 1876-1940." Her hypothesis is that the construction of western womanhood from the prevailing racial ideology "represent a primary, but previously neglected, underpinning of the increasing status of white women from the late nineteenth century." While historical studies of women and whiteness remain rare, they have the potential of giving us a new way of looking at the increasing power and status of western women during the late nineteenth century. The few studies that have been done are focused on national contexts, but Dr. Carey plans to explore her research across a greater part of the western world. She believes that the scope of the SIL's World's Fairs collections provides a unique opportunity to explore the themes of women and whiteness at an international level. Dr. Carey will concentrate on our publications relating to the 1876 Philadelphia, 1893 Chicago, 1909 London, 1915 San Francisco, 1924-25 London, 1926 Philadelphia, 1933-34 Chicago, and 1939-40 New York expositions.

MARTINA DROTH is a Research Coordinator at the Henry Moore Institute, a center for the study of sculpture next to the Leeds City Art Gallery in the United Kingdom. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Reading in 2000 with her dissertation, "Statuettes and the Role of the Ornamental in Late 19th Century Sculpture." Her project for her residency as a Baird Society Scholar will be "Sculpture and Its Material Contexts: Reading the Representation of British Sculpture from 1851 to 1900." She is particularly interested in the growing tensions in sculptural aesthetics as the production, display, and dissemination of sculpture was undergoing fundamental changes. As she notes, "the increasingly visible incursions of machinery and commercial production into the territories of fine art began to uncover sharp ideological divisions between the pluralism of industry and the exclusivity of artistic practices." The use of sculpture at world's fairs took it out of its usual milieu of museums and galleries and into a realm with industrial overtones and much more diverse audiences. "By implicating sculpture with the commercial concerns of manufacturing and industry, the exhibitions provided a context that profoundly affected the ways in which sculpture was defined materially and practically." While Dr. Droth has looked at the Great Exhibition of 1851, she wants to extend her research to subsequent fairs, including 1862 London, 1878 Paris, 1893 Chicago, and 1900 Paris. This is all part of her work on a book in planning, The Sculptural Decorative: Sculpture and the Decorative Arts in Late Nineteenth Century England.

REIKO HILLYER is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at Columbia University. She expects to have her degree in May 2005 with her dissertation, "Designing Dixie: Landscape, Tourism, and Memory in the New South, 1870-1930." Her proposed project of the same title is research on post-Civil War Northern tourists who traveled to the American south and as a result of their enjoyable time there, "created an image of the South that simultaneously soothed Northern bitterness, invited northern capital, and legitimated the development of commercial capitalism in the region." Ms. Hillyer has focused on four locations, St. Augustine, Richmond, Atlanta, and Natchez, to look at how the southern past was reshaped by northern tourism. During her tenure with us, she is planning to spend time with the numerous works in the World's Fairs collection relating to the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895 to further investigate the paradoxical relationship of Atlanta's vision as being rebuilt in the Northern image and unburdened by its Confederate past while also being a center of Lost Cause sentiment. During the New South period, "expositions were central to the South's public image; they became tourist attractions that advertised the South's commitment to industrial capitalism, united former enemies under the banner of progress, and thus helped consolidate the new national plutocracy."

ALLISON MARSH is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of the History of Science and Technology of the Johns Hopkins University. She expects to have her degree in June 2006 with her dissertation on industrial tourism in the United States from the Progressive Era through the 1980s. Her research project at SIL is "Greetings from the Shop Floor: The Rise of Industrial Tourism," which will inform her dissertation on the increasing number of tours of industrial plants and factories. As Ms. Marsh notes, "factories across industries embraced tours as a means of advertising and fostering good public relations" in the early twentieth century. In addition to factory tours, companies were also bringing factory demonstrations to a wider audience at world's fairs. Disagreeing with Marchand's claim that these demonstrations at fairs were "a romanticized version of the traditional factory tour," Ms. Marsh believes that "the working demonstrations at the Fairs were simply extensions of the tour brought to a larger audience." She will be exploring the World's Fairs collection to look for more evidence of her hypothesis while also examining the Trade Literature Collection "to compare the business-to-business claims of product performance with the claims made to the general audiences of factory tours or at the Fairs."

Baird Society Resident Scholars 2004

MATTHEW T. SNEDDON is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Washington. He received his M.A. in History from Lehigh University in 1998 and a B.A. in History and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame in 1991. He has won several awards and scholarships and his CV lists many significant accomplishments including stellar work with the Historic American Engineering Record. His project for his residency at SIL was "Exhibiting Real America: History and Heritage in Museums of Science, Technology, and Industry." The focal point for his research was the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 when the "conjunction of commemoration, calls for a national museum, and the transfer of the exposition's industrial and manufacturing exhibits (among others) to the museum [started] a history of the nation's definition of its industrial and technological heritage." His study examines "how past representations of what is authentic, both in terms of history and the objects themselves, change through the material culture of the museum which mark an understanding of how to portray a 'real' past and what artifacts are counted as the 'real thing.'" Mr. Sneddon used materials from the SIL World's Fairs Collection and some materials in the SI Archives, for information on how items become museum artifacts and how these early exhibits were developed. As a result of this project, he hopes to be able to trace the development of the history of technology beyond its current defined boundaries and to the larger issues of the preservation of the nations' industrial and engineering heritage.

SHIRLEY TERESA WAJDA is Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Kent State University. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Group in American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. Her recent research projects included an exhibition at the Kent State University Museum, "Designing Domesticity: Decorating the American Home Since 1876." Her research project for her residency at SIL is "The Fennells Build Their Dream House: Furnishing Family in 1930s America," and is an "intensive analysis of one newlywed couple's domestic consumption in 1938, one of the last years of the Great Depression." The project is based on a detailed scrapbook kept by a Mrs. Fennell listing, among other things, their wedding gifts and the furnishing and interior decoration of the new home that they had built in 1938. Through her research, Dr. Wajda will be able to pay attention to American consumers and their choices and study the social decisions made by an actual consumer and reject the economists' theoretical "rational consumer." SI Libraries' Trade Literature Collection will help trace the gifts and furnishings of their home, and the 1939 World's Fair materials as well as the papers of key designers (e.g. Donald Deskey, Henry Dreyfuss, Nathan Horwitt, and Gilbert Rohde) at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum Library will provide insight to the new designs of furnishings available to them. As she explains, these materials would allow Dr. Wajda to "explore the Fennells' scrapbook as a prism through which to project and examine the large historical forces that shape Americans' everyday life, at times without notice."

Baird Society Resident Scholars 2003

KATHLEEN CURRAN is Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. in 1986 in art history from the University of Delaware; her dissertation was "The Rundbogenstil and the Romanesque Revival in Germany and Their Efflorescence in America, ca. 1844-1865." Her book, The Romanesque Revival: Religion, Politics, and Transnational Exchange was published in late 2002 from Penn State Press. The topic of study during her residency, "American World's Fairs and the Taxonomy of Display," took her research in a new direction. The taxonomy in question in the title is the changing nature of the terms "mechanical arts" and "industrial arts" and their relationship to the fine arts and liberal arts. Robert Rydell noted the importance of the terminology and its relation to world's fairs when he wrote that the fairs' classification schemes might be "among the most important contributions by exposition organizers to intellectual history. They not only reflected contemporary thinking about how the universe should be perceived but also actually determined how that universe would be presented." Dr. Curran examined the taxonomic systems of three fairs, New York (1853), Philadelphia (1876), and Chicago (1893) and focused on the large division of manufactures, analyzing how what was considered "mechanical or industrial arts" in the earlier fairs became "decorative or fine arts" by the time of the Chicago fair. She also examined how changing conceptions of the industrial/decorative arts were adopted by the museums that were offshoots of the American fairs, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Chicago Art Institute. 

SUSAN FERNSEBNER is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Chinese History at the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation topic is "Material Modernities: China's Participation in World's Fairs and Expositions, 1876-1955." She received her M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University in 1993 and was a Visiting Scholar at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, People's Republic of China, for the 1999-2000 academic year. The research topic for her residency at SIL has the same title as her dissertation, and she used her time here to perform the research necessary to develop her dissertation into a revised book manuscript. Her overall work presents the first detailed examination of China's participation in world's fairs and during her residency she concentrated on a focused study of four American fairs: Philadelphia (1876), Chicago (1893), St. Louis (1904), and San Francisco (1915). Her research looks closely at the ways in which the material culture of a nation is manipulated by Chinese exposition managers in order to advertise a modern nation. Her work helps in providing: an integrated view of three historical eras of Chinese history (late Imperial, Republican, and Socialist); an understanding of the ways in which both mainland Chinese and Chinese-American populations sought to capitalize on the material spectacle associated with a developing Pacific marketplace and the representation of a Chinese nation at world's fairs; and a counterpoint to Western constructions of an orientalist "other" at the world's fairs.

Baird Society Resident Scholars 2002

REGINA BLASZCZYK joined us from Boston University where she is Assistant Professor of History and American Studies and Endowed Chair in American Material Culture. She received her B.A. in Art History (1978) from Marlboro College, her M.A. in American Civilization (1987) from George Washington University, and her M.A. in History (1991) and her Ph.D. in History (1995) from the University of Delaware. Regina used this research project, entitled "Color, Design, and Modernism," to build on her new book, seeking a better understanding of the relationship between design and color and their use in American industry, especially in terms of the style known as "Modernism." In the twentieth century, Modernism visibly divided cultural forms into "high" and "low" for the benefit of established power relations. Regina believes that Modernism was actually energized by others in the design profession, including actors whose expertise lay not in the glamorous high-profile realm of styling, but in the creation, selection, and management of color. Modernism spotlighted the work of streamlining's key design consultants, while pushing color's equally talented stylists into the shadows. Her intention was to bring the color professionals out of the shadows and into their proper place in the history of design. At the Cooper-Hewitt, Regina studied a range of primary sources related to the history of the decorative arts and design. These included books and pamphlets on color in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and an imprint collection that once belonged to Dorothy Nickerson, a USDA color scientist and prime mover in the Inter-society Color Council, an important organization that fostered cross-industry exchange. In addition, the Cooper-Hewitt owns the little-studied archives of Donald Deskey, Henry Dreyfuss, and other prominent industrial designers. These collections are potential gold mine for the history of color innovation, as designers often collected marketing surveys, corresponded with clients about aesthetic choices, and participated in organizations such as the Color Association of the United States and the Inter-Society Color Council.

SARAH LINFORD came to us as a Ph.D. candidate in Art History in a joint program with Princeton University and Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, France. She received her B.A. in Art History and Comparative Literature (1993) from the University of California at Berkeley, her D.E.A. in Art History (1994) from Université Paris, and her M.A. in Art History (1996) from Princeton. She is preparing her doctoral dissertation for publication and has worked on art exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sarah's project is titled, "The Official Avant-garde of the Third Republic? French Symbolism at the World Fairs 1873-1906." Her primary research goal was to undertake a systematic study of Symbolist art at the world's fairs from 1873 to 1906. She hoped to find out if the works from those fairs support the particular claim that Symbolism is increasingly present, and the larger argument that what is discussed under the auspices of "national tradition" or exhibited as such evolves according to the same principles as Symbolist neo-traditionalism. The retrospective exhibition of the centennial of French art (in 1900) would be just one milestone in this progression, a milestone that could only be understood over an extended period of time. She also looked more closely at the architecture of the French pavilions at these fairs; the presence of "colonial villages" and ethnological exhibits at the fairs in terms of what imagery was available to artists; "japonisme" at the fairs; and the 1889 fair as a vehicle for the Republicans attempt to recast the events of 1789 as a way of identifying the "nation" with the "republic." Sarah conducted an extensive study of French art in the World's Fairs collection of catalogues from the period of French Symbolism, 1873 to 1906. She looked at materials ranging from official government reports to exposition management publications to exhibition catalogues, visitors' guides, commemorative publications, descriptive accounts, exhibit brochures, congress proceedings, periodical special issues, and other relevant information in the collection.

Baird Society Resident Scholars 2001

JOÃO FELIPE GONÇALVES came to us as a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at The Johns Hopkins University. He received his B.A. in Social Sciences (1997) from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and his M.A. in Social Anthropology (1999) from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He had published essays in the edited volumes, Estudos Históricos sobre Rui Barbosa and Tradição e Inovação, an article in a scholarly journal, and a book review. João's project was titled, "The Presentation of Brazil at World's Fairs and Expositions: 1851-1914." He investigated the construction of Brazilian national identity through its developed presentation to an international audience, connected to ideals of modernity commonly referred to as "civilization." He also looked at how foreign audiences received and reacted to this presentation, thereby helping to determine which image of Brazil emerged from its participation in world's fairs. João used the world's fairs collection, specifically twenty-six titles from nine different fairs and expositions, including the national exhibitions held in Rio de Janeiro in 1875 and 1908 that concentrated on Brazilian participation. Of no less importance was his survey of other works that placed the Brazilian exhibitions in context with those of other nations and those in which that Brazil intended to take part but never did.

CHRISTINE G. O'MALLEY came to us as a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Architectural History at the University of Virginia. She received her B.A. in Art History (1991) and her M.A. in Art History (1993) from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and her M.Arch.Hist. (1998) from the University of Virginia. Christine's project was titled, "American Industrial Designers and the Challenge to Architecture, 1925-1960: World's Fairs." Her research focused on the rise of industrial designers and their growing involvement in architectural and exhibition projects for world's fairs and expositions, with particular emphasis on the 1939 New York World's Fair and the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. In her examination of these events, she planned to emphasize the ways in which industrial designers extended their practice into the field of architecture and effectively created a full-service design profession. Her aim was to answer several important questions about the dynamic role and activities of industrial designers during this period, and her research went far toward this goal. The questions were: how did industrial designers make inroads into an area previously controlled by architects? What forms and details did these industrial designers offer their clients and why were their presentations successful? How did architects and the public react to these projects by industrial designers? How did these projects influence architects and force them to rethink their approach to professional practice? Christine examined our unique collection of research material from the 1939 New York World's Fair and 1958 Brussels World's Fair which includes guide books, exhibition books, souvenir books, maps, photographic essays, scrapbooks, articles, ephemera, and other fair-related publications. These works offered a wide variety of useful documents for understanding and interpreting the two fairs. The range of the items in the collection enabled her to do a detailed and careful analysis of the presentation and reception of the fair's buildings and exhibitions. In addition, the rich collection of trade literature in the National Museum of American History Branch Library served as an important resource for her research, the trade catalogs of companies involved in the commercial pavilions at these fairs.

Baird Society Resident Scholars 2000

CARL A. ZIMRING came to us as a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. He received his B.A. in History (1991) from the University of California-Santa Cruz, his A.M. in Social Studies (1993) from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. in History (1995) from Carnegie Mellon. Carl's project was titled, "Recycling for Profit: The Evolution of the American Scrap Industry." This research was a part of his doctoral dissertation, which sought to improve the overall understanding of the business of resource recovery and offer historical examples of success and failure for the benefit of contemporary recovery efforts. As a result, it should make an important contribution to the fields of Industrial Ecology, Environmental History, and Business History. For his research, Carl used the trade literature collection, which includes several trade catalogs that serviced the scrap industry over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Holdings such as Cox and Sons Company's 1883 trade catalogs on scrap metal bundlers, Morgan Engineering Company's 1915 catalog on scrap shears, Henry Pels & Co.'s trade catalog from 1921 featuring punching and shearing machines, and Thos. W. Ward Limited's 1940 catalogs on scrap metal handling and distribution all provided information on the kind of technologies available to scrap processors throughout the period. These catalogs, combined with trade publications such as Scrap Age (available at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries offices in Washington, DC) and the business records of scrap firms such as the David J. Joseph Company provide both graphic and textural materials that illustrate how the business of processing scrap evolved into a specialized, capital intensive industry utilizing shears, balers, shredders, cranes, magnets and related equipment between 1860-1965.

JULIE K. BROWN came to us as an independent scholar living in San Antonio, TX. She received her B.A. in Education/Philosophy (1962) from Boston College, her M.A. in Art History (1966) from the University of Rochester, and her Ph.D. in History (1985) from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Julie's project was titled "Representing Welfare, Corrections, Health, and Municipal Improvement: A History of the United States Social Economy Displays at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904." This study addressed an important question about representation: how the subjects of welfare, corrections, health, and cities, or "social economy" as it was collectively referred to at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, were formulated for public display. At a critical time when new ideas were emerging in industrial betterment, social reform, judicial legislation, health advocacy, and municipal improvement, the 1904 St. Louis Exposition provided a key opportunity for connecting people to welfare and reform issues through displays. Her research looked at how the images, models, living exhibits, and texts were used in these displays and how effective were they for an exposition audience. For her research, Julie needed the extensive world's fairs collection housed in the Dibner Library, an essential tool for this project. Cross-referencing and comparing information was done to track the development of social economy displays at the earliest events including the 1889 Paris Universelle Exposition, 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, and the 1900 Paris Universelle Exposition in order to understand the precedents for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition. She also used the trade literature collection to locate relevant materials used for displays by companies and institutions. The industrial betterment section of the social economy displays at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, the first of its kind at any international exposition, included eleven different groups of private companies, provident institutions, and state regulatory boards of industry and labor. Among prominent exhibitors' materials that were examined were: the American Institute of Social Service (NY); H.J. Heinz Company (PA); Prudential Insurance Co. (NJ); the Philadelphia Commercial Museum; and National Cash Register Co. (OH).

SARAH C. HAND Sarah came to us as a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. She received her B.A. in American Studies (1995) from Smith College, and her M.A. in History (1996) from Vanderbilt University. Sarah's project was titled, "'They Will be Adjudged By Their Drinke': Alcohol, Race, and Gender in Early Virginia." Alcohol was critical to the survival of the seventeenth-century settlers of the American colonies. Her research concentrated on Virginia because, although several fine studies have been published recently on alcohol in early modern New England, Philadelphia, England, France, Latin America, and Africa, no one had yet examined how Virginia settlers tried to meet their needs for alcohol. The absence of a history of brewing in Virginia is particularly striking because of all the southern colonies; only in Virginia was the production of beer significant before the American Revolution. Moreover, the study of how a once common, home-produced foodstuff became a mass-consumed, massproduced product reveals how changing economic relationships affect social relationships. Sarah examined a number of items in the These include the journals of the Royal Society of London, which colonists like William Byrd and Landon Carter read for ideas and instructions. Other scientific studies and treatises like Louis Pasteur's Studies on Fermentation, Michael Combrune's The Theory and Practice of Brewing, T. A. Knight's A Treatise on the Culture of the Apple & Pear. and on the Manufacture of Cider & Perry, and William Symons' The Practical Gager, dealt directly on her research. The histories the industry wrote of itself, for example works like George Tavers' A Century of Brewing, the St. James's Gate Brewery. History and Guide, F. &M. Schaefer Brewing Company's To Commemorate Our 100th Year, and the Brewers' Industrial Exhibition Essays on the Malt Liquor Question, were helpful, in examining the mythology of the industry and how the industry presented itself to consumers. Nineteenth-century brewing manuals like Walter Sykes, The Principles and Practice of Brewing, William Black's A Practical Treatise on Brewing, Thomas Thomson's Brewing and Distillation, and James Steel's Selection of the Practical Points of Malting and Brewing, also revealed the changes in the industry from its seventeenth-century foundations. Works directed at home brewers such as Marcus Byrn's The Complete Practical Brewer, John Ham's The Theory and Practice of Brewing, John Tuck's The Private Brewer's Guide to the Art of Brewing Ale and Porter and Alexander Morrice's A Treatise on Brewing, indicated both the continuation of home brewing on a much-reduced level, and the impact of commercial breweries on home production.