WhoFish - Local Events and Activities

Title:	Author Book Talk Erin Pauwels, Napoleon Saronys Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded
Date:	4/17/2026 (Friday)
Address:	New Bedford Whaling Museum 18 Johnny Cake Hill, New Bedford, MA
Location:	New Bedford, MA
Hours:	12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Cost/Cover:	Please call or email for admission details
Web Page:	https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/author-book-talk-erin- ...
Contact Info:	508-997-0046

Details:

About the Author: Erin Pauwels is an historian of modern and contemporary art in the Americas with special interest in photography, Indigenous Studies, and ecocritical approaches to visual culture, and currently an Associate Professor of Art History and Undergraduate Advisor Art History at Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Pauwels explores the politics of portraiture and placemaking, technologies of image dissemination, and intersections between theater and the visual arts. Her first book, Napoleon Sarony's Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York was published by the Penn State University Press in 2024. It reconstructs the lost legacy of a once-famous nineteenth-century artist to reveal how the emergence of mass media reshaped definitions of artistic authorship along with the global reach and material character of art objects. Other recent publications include essays on photography as a site of Native resistance; the hybrid media operations of painted studio backdrops; and the ambiguous potency of photographic truth claims in the context of digital and social media. Her published work appears in the journals American Art, Panorama, History & Technology, as well as edited volumes such as The Routledge Companion to Art and Empire: Imperialism and Aesthetic Practices, 1800-1950 (Routledge, 2025), and Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography (University of California Press, 2020). Pauwels's research has earned support from prominent funding institutions including the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Wyeth Foundation for American Art, Houghton Library of Harvard University, Harry Ransom Center, Huntington Library, American Antiquarian Society, and the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. Pauwels is a proud member of the Association of Historians of American Art, the Photography Network, and recently was elected to the Print Council of America. In the 2024-25 academic year she served as the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford.