Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar (NLUS) 2019

Admission to the seminar is by application, and spaces are limited.
The application deadline is September 30, 2018, 11:59 pm.
Ready to apply? Apply now!​

1. Written Statement: A written statement (maximum 500 words) explaining your preparation and reasons for participation in the Newberry Library seminar. You should discuss your interest in the topic (see brochure), courses that you have taken and experiences that you have had that prepare you for the seminar, and the ways in which you see this seminar relating to your short-term and long-term educational and/or career plans. Please include a discussion of your experience conducting academic research.
2. Writing Sample: This should be a copy of a recent research paper or analytical essay (paper containing a thesis statement supported by evidence and analysis) that you have written for a college course.
3. Unofficial DePaul transcript: You can print out a copy from Campus Connection.
4. Brief Letter of Recommendation from Faculty Member: All applications require one letter of recommendation from a professor who is familiar with your work and can attest to your readiness to do intensive interdisciplinary study and independent library research. It should be sent to Prof. Tikoff via e-mail (to vtikoff@depaul.edu). The letter need not be long, but please give your recommender ample time to write it and submit it by the application deadline. If your recommender has any questions, please have him or her contact Valentina Tikoff at 773-325-1570, or vtikoff@depaul.edu.

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.​

The course will be taught by Drs. Melissa Bradshaw and Mark Pohlad.

Melissa Bradshaw teaches in the English Department at Loyola University Chicago. Her research focuses on publicity, personality, and fandom in twentieth century British and American literature. She has published extensively on the American 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 (Ashgate, 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 multivenue 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.​