To learn more about the Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar, or to apply, please get in touch with the contact person on your campus. Applicants are required to submit an application form, an up-to-date college transcript, an essay (500 words, maximum) explaining why they want to take the course and what they hope to gain from it, and a recent research paper completed for a college course (preferably with the instructor’s comments and grade). Individual universities may have additional requirements. DePaul Professor Valentina Tikoff Department of History 773-325-1570 | [email protected]Loyola Professor Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Department of History 773-508-2221 | [email protected]Roosevelt Professor Priscilla Archibald Department of Literature and Languages 312-341-6453 | [email protected]UIC Professor Ellen McClure School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics (312) 996-5076 | [email protected]The Newberry Library, an independent research library located on Chicago’s near north side, has been free and open to the public since its founding in 1887. The Newberry’s holdings number more than 1.5 million volumes, 15,000 linear feet of manuscript pages, and 600,000 maps. The collections concern the civilizations of Western Europe and the Americas from the late Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. For more information on the Newberry’s holdings, visit www.newberry.org/core-collections. MODERN LITERATURE AND ART IN CHICAGO: 1900-1960 The Newberry Library Research and Academic Programs 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL 60610 www.newberry.org phone: 312.255.3602 Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar 2019 Cover image: COP1913, Grant B. Schmalgemeier Century of Progress Postcard Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago
Transcript
To learn more about the Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar, or to apply, please get in touch with the contact person on your campus. Applicants are required to submit an application form, an up-to-date college transcript, an essay (500 words, maximum) explaining why they want to take the course and what they hope to gain from it, and a recent research paper completed for a college course (preferably with the instructor’s comments and grade). Individual universities may have additional requirements.
DePaulProfessor Valentina Tikoff Department of History 773-325-1570 | [email protected]
LoyolaProfessor Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Department of History 773-508-2221 | [email protected]
RooseveltProfessor Priscilla Archibald Department of Literature and Languages 312-341-6453 | [email protected]
UICProfessor Ellen McClure School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics (312) 996-5076 | [email protected]
The Newberry Library, an independent research library located on Chicago’s near north side, has been free and open to the public since its founding in 1887. The Newberry’s holdings number more than 1.5 million volumes, 15,000 linear feet of manuscript pages, and 600,000 maps. The collections concern the civilizations of Western Europe and the Americas from the late Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. For more information on the Newberry’s holdings, visit www.newberry.org/core-collections.
MODERN LITERATURE AND ART IN CHICAGO:
1900-1960
The Newberry Library Research and Academic Programs60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL 60610
www.newberry.orgphone: 312.255.3602
Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar 2019
Cover image: COP1913, Grant B. Schmalgemeier Century of Progress Postcard Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago
About the InstructorsMelissa Bradshaw teaches in the English Depart-ment at Loyola University Chicago. Her research focuses on publicity, personality, and fandom in twentieth century British and American litera-ture. She has published extensively on the Ameri-can poet Amy Lowell, co-editing a volume of her poems as well as a volume of scholarly essays about her. Her book, Amy Lowell, Diva Poet (Ash-gate, 2011), won the 2011 MLA Book Prize for Independent Scholars. She has also published on Edith Sitwell, Edna St. Vincent Millay and on divas more generally. She is an associate editor of the journal Feminist Modernist Studies and is currently working on an edition of Amy Lowell’s collected letters, as well as a book on celebrity poets and ephemera, titled “Collectible Women: American Poets as Things.”
Mark Pohlad is Associate Professor in the department of History of Art and Architecture, at DePaul University. An Americanist with a strong background in modern art, he teaches courses in American, modern, 19th-century, and the history of photography. He recently published the monograph, James R. Hopkins: Faces of the Heartland (Ohio State University Press, 2017) that accompanied a multi-venue exhibition he co-curated of the same title. Pohlad’s publications explore Chicago topics, the art and literature associated with Abraham Lincoln, and the history of photography. He recently gave a lecture for C-SPAN on the imagery of Lincoln, and is featured in a WTTW “Art Design Chicago” documentary on the Chicago sculptor, Lorado Taft.
The Newberry Library Undergraduate SeminarThis seminar is a unique opportunity for Chicago-area undergraduates to explore the humanities at one of America’s foremost research libraries. Taught by a team of instructors from sponsoring universities, the seminar is offered each year from January to May and carries the credit of two courses. Seminar topics change each year, but all are related to the Newberry’s holdings. Each class is limited to 20 participants who pursue common assignments and individual research projects.
This seminar examines modern literature and art in relation to Chicago’s unique history, neighborhoods and demographics. Besides surveying major works produced in this city, the course will examine how Chicago’s creative production arose from its identity as a rail and mail order hub, meat processing center, architectural innovator, site for world’s fairs, and as a flashpoint for racial and labor tension. As such, the course will be divided into units focusing on popular, populist, and avant-garde movements in art and literature. Topics within these units will include the Chicago Black Arts movement, local writing on literature, art, and architecture, little magazines, and major exhibitions such as the Armory Show (1913) and the Negro In Art Week (1927).
The course has four primary objectives: students will come away able to think critically about the formal and aesthetic properties of early to mid-twentieth-century Chicago art, architecture, and literature; they will gain an understanding of connections between art and broader cultural issues; they will learn how to use an archive to do historical research; and they will learn how to incorporate what they find to produce a substantive, graduate-level research paper.
The course will utilize the full resources of the Newberry’s holdings on Chicago modernism to develop the course’s central premise: that the city should be regarded as an important center of innovation and production in all the arts — visual, musical, dance, literature, and architecture.
The course draws on the papers of writers such as Eunice Tietjens and Sherwood Anderson; columnists Claudia Cassidy, Ben Hecht, Henry Hanson, and Fanny Butcher; and materials as diverse as those associated with both world’s fairs, the Arts Club of Chicago, and the Midwest Dance Collection. Students will also read primary sources such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Carl Sandburg, art criticism by Harriet Monroe, as well as issues of her celebrated Poetry magazine. Students will also engage the major modernist artworks made and exhibited in this city. Carefully chosen trips to local institutions include the Art Institute and the National Museum of Mexican Art. For their final projects, students will be encouraged to address their own interests, stemming from the texts and artworks under examination, and just as importantly, drawing on their exploration of the Newberry’s holdings.
MODERN LITERATURE AND ART IN CHICAGO:1900-1960
January 15, 2019 through May 2, 2019 / Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2-5pmThe course will meet at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL.
