What does it mean to consider visual materials as material culture or to think about material culture as visual?  What can these approaches tell us about objects, images, and their relationship in the nineteenth century? While visual culture studies have emphasized the act of seeing as embedded within disciplinary or “scopic” regimes, material culture studies have long analyzed artifacts to understand their expressive function in society.  However, this situation has been changing. The convergence of visual and material culture offers the opportunity to consider the possibilities of such a scholarly turn. Participants in this symposium will consider these issues from a variety of fields.

8:30–9am                    Breakfast

9–9:05am                    Jeffrey L. Collins

                                    Bard Graduate Center

                                    Welcome

9:05–9:15am               David Jaffee

                                    Bard Graduate Center

                                    Introduction 

9:15–10:45am             SESSION ONE

                                    Catherine E. Kelly

                                    University of Oklahoma

                                    Chair

                                    Erika Piola

                                    Library Company of Philadelphia

                                    “Making the Invisible Visible: Reading Nineteenth-Century

                                    Raised Printing for the Blind”

                                    Christopher Lukasik

                                    Purdue University

                                    “The Matter of Images: Embellishment, Textual Illustration,

                                    and the Literary Annuals of the 1830s and 40s” 

10:45–11am                Coffee Break

11am–12:30pm           SESSION TWO

                                    Zara Anishanslin

                                    College of Staten Island, CUNY

                                    Chair

                                    Layla Bermeo

                                    Harvard University; Smithsonian American Art Museum

                                    “War Paintings: The Making and Materiality of Nineteenth

                                    Century Comanche Shields”

                                    Elizabeth Hutchinson

                                    Barnard College, Columbia University

                                    “Framing Catlin’s Indian Gallery”

12:30–1:45pm             Lunch Break

1:45–3:15pm               SESSION THREE

                                    Joshua Brown

                                    Graduate Center, CUNY

                                    Chair

                                    Matthew Fox-Amato

                                    Washington University in St. Louis

                                    “Civil War Iconoclasm” 

                                    Annie Rudd

                                    Columbia University

                                    “Posing a Problem: Studio Portraiture, the Objects of

                                    Photography, and the Pursuit of Genuine Likeness,

                                    1839-1900”

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