2019 Fall Conference
Hagley Library, 298 Buck Road, Wilmington, DE
The 2019 fall conference will convene an international group of scholars concerned with the power of pictures in the world of commerce. As pictures became a central feature of the advertising message in the second half of the nineteenth century, they migrated from the pages of newspapers and magazines, and the posters on the sides of buildings, to such technologies as electrical spectaculars, film, and later, television. At the heart of this diffusion was an effort to make the pictorial sales message migrate not only across media but also into the minds of consumers.
Conference panels will take place throughout the day on Friday, November 8 in the Soda House.
This conference is part of a two-year initiative on commercial pictures and the art of visual persuasion organized by Jennifer Greenhill (Associate Professor of Art History, USC), Vanessa Schwartz (Professor of Art History and History and Director of the Visual Studies Research Institute, USC), and Alex Taylor (Assistant Professor and Academic Curator, University of Pittsburgh). Roger Horowitz, Director of Hagley’s Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, will join the program committee of this conference. This initiative includes the Hagley conference in November 2019; a team-taught interdisciplinary graduate seminar at the University of Southern California, Spring 2020; a second conference at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, in September 2020; and a volume of essays.
For a listing of past Hagley conferences, click here.
Banner image: Ladies Home Journal (1921), Hagley Digital Archives.