Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture
Art and Art History
Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art
Oxford University, 2019-2020
The Primers | The Photographers | The Progressives | The Pragmatists
Moderator: Melanie Chambliss, Assistant Professor in the Humanities, History, and Social Sciences, Columbia College Chicago
At the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. national consciousness was challenged by both migration and immigration. White progressives, such as Jane Addams, sought to improve the conditions of newly arrived immigrants and borrowed strategies for racial, adapting them to encourage assimilation. Looking at images generated by Joseph Stella, Norah Hamilton and Lewis Hine, I consider how portraits from the progressive era contributed to the emerging constructs of race and ethnicity across the color line.