Vanessa Meikle Schulman
Vanessa Meikle Schulman
Professor
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual culture of the United States; periodical studies; history of technology
Vanessa Meikle Schulman is a specialist in the art and visual culture of the United States. She received her PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine, in 2010, and has published her research in the academic journals American Art, Invisible Culture, Nineteenth Century Studies, and American Periodicals, among others. She is also an editor at Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Her first book, Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2015. Her second book, Art during Wartime: Painting Everyday Life in the Civil War North, is out now!
Dr. Schulman offers classes on history of photography, the art and architecture of the United States from the colonial era through the twentieth century, and other thematic art history courses.
Selected Publications
Books
Art During Wartime: Painting Everyday Life in the Civil War North (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024). Out now!
Work Sights: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015). More info here!
Selected Articles
"Sensing Pollution: Picturing 'Bad Air' in Gilded Age New York," Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 9, no. 2 (Fall 2023): https://journalpanorama.org
“‘In honor, as in limb, unmarred’: Obsession with the ‘Whole’ Body in Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War,” European Journal of American Studies 19, no. 1 (Fall 2023): https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.20824
“‘The Universal Notion of Being Photographed’: Memory and Medium in Harold Frederic’s Civil War Novella Marsena,” Nineteenth Century Studies 34 (2022): 61-76.
"Visuality in Literary Magazines," in The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine, ed. Tim Lanzendörfer (London: Routledge, 2022), 59-70.
"The Pleasure of the Parlor: Mocking the Home Guard in Civil War Visual Culture," Studies in American Humor 7, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 105-127.
"Visualizing Race at the Polling Place: Thomas Waterman Wood's American Citizens," American Art 33, no. 3 (Spring 2019): 24-51.
“‘The Books We All Read’: The Golden Age of Children’s Book Illustration and American Soldiers in the Great War,” The Lion and the Unicorn 41 (2017): 204-230.
“Alph-Art, B Movies, Cast Corpses: Death by Sculpture and Hergé’s Middle Ground,” in The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines Are not so Clear, ed. Joe Sutliffe Sanders (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 62-76.
“Managing Subjects, Manufacturing Citizens: Picturing Sites of Social Control in Nineteenth-Century America.” Early Popular Visual Culture 12.2 (May 2014): 104-126.
“Definite Indeterminacy: Blindness in the Civil War Imagery of Ambrose Bierce and Winslow Homer,” Invisible Culture 19 (Fall 2013): ivc.lib.rochester.edu
“Making the Magazine: Visuality, Managerial Capitalism, and the Mass Production of Periodicals, 1865-1890,” American Periodicals 22.1 (Spring 2012): 1-28.
Awards
2023 New Foundation for Art History Subvention Grant, to support the publication of Art During Wartime
2021 Fellow (fall semester), GMU Center for Humanities Research
2018 Spurgeon H. Neel writing award from the Army Medical Foundation, for the essay "J.J. Woodward, the Philadelphia Centennial, and Medical Imaging in Nineteenth Century America"
2016 International Committee for the History of Technology book prize for junior scholars (ICOHTEC Turriano Prize), for Work Sights
2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, for Work Sights
Courses Taught
ARTH 101: Introduction to Visual Arts
ARTH 303: British Art from the Tudors to Today
ARTH 350: History of Photography
ARTH 370: Arts of the United States
ARTH 371: American Architecture and Material Culture
ARTH 372/HIST 389: The Civil War and Visual Culture
ARTH 375: Indigenous Arts of the US and Canada
ARTH 394/594: The Museum
ARTH 471/599: Visualizing Science in the Modern World
ARTH 471/599: Art and Culture of the U.S. Gilded Age
ARTH 471/599: The Interwar United States
ARTH 471/599: Art and Environment
ARTH 499/599: Photography, Race, and Empire
ARTH 601: Colloquium in Art History
Academic Director, Oxford Semester Experience Program (UK), spring 2023
Education
Ph.D. 2010, Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine
M.A. 2007, Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine
A.B. 2003, History of Art and Architecture and American Civilization, Brown University
Dissertations Supervised
Anne Dobberteen, Visual Cultures of Air Defense in World War II Washington, DC (2025)