This dissertation employs concepts of sense of place, consumption, and terroir (a French term often translated “taste of place”) to evaluate the ways that nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century representations of southern agriculture – advertisements, art, events, landscapes, and material culture – jointly promote produce and place in and beyond the American South. Reconceiving terroir as a perception of place associated with various senses (including, but not limited to, taste) that circulates via non-edible forms, the project examines how Southern promoters used representations of agricultural goods, landscapes, and workers to market four specific products from their region—North Carolina tobacco, Virginia peanuts, Florida oranges, and South Carolina rice—to consumers across the United States. I explore how various groups and individuals developed advertisements, art, events, and material culture that evoked elements of southern terroir to sell consumers fantasies of the region’s produce and attractions. By analyzing the ways that companies used visual and material representations to convey place-specific sensory qualities of food to national buyers, this project models a new approach toward understanding the localized meanings of Southern foodstuffs and expands on work in foodways studies that has focused on the material qualities of comestibles themselves. I connect the South to post-Civil War and twentieth century national advertising trends, particularly the widespread use of racist caricatures and evocations of social class, and I illustrate the pervasiveness of regional imaginings within the visual and material worlds of commodified agriculture. I also consider how representations of tobacco, peanuts, oranges, and rice created by members of the localized communities in which these products were grown creatively contributed to, reclaimed, or contested place-based identities and memories as intertwined with agricultural output. Addressing creators and consumers who have come to these products from a variety of geographic, financial, cultural, and racial backgrounds, my project demonstrates that twentieth century promotional representations of Southern produce functioned on local, regional, and national scales. Ultimately the dissertation shows that southern agricultural promotions and commemorations have long revolved around the consumption of place itself. / 2024-11-02T00:00:00Z

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As taxidermy increased in prominence in American natural history museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea of trying to replicate nature through mounts and displays became increasingly central. Crude practices of overstuffing skins gave way to a focus on the artistic modelling of animal skins over a sculpted plaster and papier-mâché form to create scientifically accurate and aesthetically pleasing mounts, a technique largely developed at Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York. Many of Ward's taxidermists utilized their authority in taxidermy practices as they formally organized into the short-lived Society of American Taxidermists (1880-1883) before moving into positions in natural history museums across the United States. Through examinations of published and archival museum materials, as well as historic mounts, I argue that taxidermists at these museums reached an unspoken consensus concerning how their mounts would balance pleasing aesthetics with scientific accuracy, while adjusting their practices as they considered the priorities of numerous stakeholders. Taxidermists negotiated through administrative priorities, legacies of prominent craftsmen, and a battery of instructive materials, all claiming some authority as to what proper taxidermy could—and should—be. The shifts in taxidermy authority revealed truths about what taxidermy could mean, questions of how taxidermists identified themselves within the profession and to outsiders, practices for presenting taxidermy to museum visitors, and techniques for representing nature. This project traces the paths of consensus for developing techniques to construct museum taxidermy from the 1883 end of the S.A.T until the founding of the Technical Section of the American Association of Museums (AAM) in 1929. Two critics who book-end this project—Robert Wilson Shufeldt, an army doctor, naturalist, and museum critic, and Lawrence Vail Coleman, director of preparation and exhibition, American Museum of Natural History, and director of the American Association of Museums—identified similar characteristics that suggest a like-minded approach as to what constituted proper museum taxidermy among museum taxidermists. Museum taxidermy carried with it a set of characteristics: accuracy and a pleasing aesthetic for Shufeldt; feeling, unity, action, balance, reality, and size for Coleman. These two sets of criteria complemented each other as they reified consensus. What complicated this finding was that taxidermists themselves did not acknowledge them specifically, only relating to them in passing, if at all. Regardless, taxidermic practice seemed to be consistent across these decades. This study complicates the nature of scientific representation, in that it focuses a great deal on its artistry. Museum taxidermy is supposed to be an instructional tool, guiding museum visitors in the way they approach nature, and especially how they see animals, and focusing on teaching the science of animal behavior, biodiversity, and habitat, to name a few. It is a scientific object, representing the most up-to-date research in the field, but consensus surrounding it is not scientifically measurable. Instead, taxidermy consensus happened in hallways and back rooms (both literal and metaphorical), with little written down, and the mounts as the most substantial evidence that is had been achieved. Nevertheless, taxidermists negotiated the array of stakeholders present—museum administrators, naturalists, collectors, and the public—as they fashioned mounts that were both accurate and aesthetically pleasing representations of animal lives. / Doctor of Philosophy / In this project I look at museum taxidermy in United States natural history museums, from the 1880s to 1930s. In that 50-year span, taxidermy practices coalesced around a primary technique for mounting animal skins, using a wooden form and papier-mâché as the structure for stretching the skin over it. But there was more to this consensus than using the same techniques, as two critics who book-end this project—Robert Wilson Shufeldt, an army doctor, naturalist, museum critic, etc., and Lawrence Vail Coleman, director of preparation and exhibition, American Museum of Natural History, and director of the American Association of Museums—identified similar characteristics that suggest a like-minded approach as to what constituted proper museum taxidermy among museum taxidermists. I argue in this project that taxidermists reached an unspoken consensus around their craft that balanced scientific accuracy with a pleasing aesthetic, to achieve mounts that would be both scientifically meaningful and not off-putting to museum visitors. Museum taxidermy carried with it a set of characteristics: accuracy and a pleasing aesthetic for Shufeldt; feeling, unity, action, balance, reality, and size for Coleman. And these two complement each other as they reify consensus. What complicated this finding was that taxidermists themselves did not acknowledge them specifically, only relating to them in passing, if at all. Regardless, taxidermy seemed to be consistent across these decades. This study complicates the nature of scientific representation, in that it focuses a great deal on its artistic nature. Museum taxidermy is supposed to be an instructional tool, guiding museum visitors in the way they approach nature, and especially how they see animals. Museum taxidermy generally shies away from terrifying visitors with animal size and ferocity, focusing instead on teaching the science of animal behavior, biodiversity, and habitat, to name a few. In this sense, it is a scientific object, representing the most up-to-date research in the field. Consensus in the realm of taxidermy, and in scientific representation more broadly, is not scientific consensus, but more consistent with an artistic approach, like a posteriori recognitions of characteristics unique to artists or artistic movements. Taxidermy consensus happened in hallways and back rooms, with little written down, and the mounts as the most substantial evidence. Nevertheless, taxidermists negotiated the array of stakeholders present—museum administrators, naturalists, collectors, and the public—as they consistently made these mounts both accurate and aesthetically pleasing. And they still make sense when we see them, as they can be repurposed to tell new stories consistent with current understandings of animal lives.

The massive mortality rates of the American Civil War challenged mid-nineteenth century Americans' understandings and relationship with death. Faced with inadequate methods of individual identification and record-keeping that were unable to keep up with the overwhelming mobilization of both men and resources that the war demanded, many soldiers simply disappeared or were buried under a stone marked "unknown." Even soldiers who kept their names died far from home, away from family, in a manner that challenged nineteenth century traditions of death. These factors caused many soldiers to seek some manner of permanence to ensure that their name would not be forgotten following death. This project examines the ways in which soldiers used visual culture, particularly graffiti, drawings, and studio photographs, to find permanence amidst the destruction and death of war. By looking at the subjects of and the ways that soldiers used the visual culture they created, this thesis seeks to understand the value of visual culture as both an outlet for soldiers of the Civil War and as an invaluable source for historical research today. This project first explores the role of religion as both a subject of and an influence on visual culture. It then moves on to examine how soldiers used visual culture as a means finding permanence, including as a means of claiming a place in and piece of the war and as a form of memorialization. By examining the power of visual culture for finding permanence, this project provides insight into the ways in which soldiers sought to remember each other and their own experiences while also adding to the human conversation on mortality. / Master of Arts

Voilà plus d'une génération que les visual studies ont entrepris de bousculer procédures scientifiques et organigrammes universitaires, dans le monde anglo-américain d’abord, puis à l’échelle planétaire. Jouant la porosité des champs du savoir, ce courant de recherches fonctionne à la manière d’une interface où s’échangent et se combinent les charges théoriques et critiques de l’histoire de l’art, du post-structuralisme, des études culturelles et autres area studies, offrant un lieu de convergence inédit pour des pensées dispersées. En embrassant l’imagerie démotique autant que savante, en déconstruisant l’axiologie tacite qui sous-tend de tels partages hiérarchiques, et en interrogeant l’idéologie de tout acte de connaissance, les visual studies assument depuis l’origine une position limite, entre discours savant, activité critique et engagement politique. S’ils peuvent apparaître comme une nouveauté radicale, les travaux groupés sous cette bannière sont symptomatiques d’un mouvement plus général de renouvellement des façons de penser les images et la dimension visuelle du sensible. Au moment où les visual studies bénéficient d’une première réception dans l’espace francophone, cette thèse s’attache à en restituer les fondements épistémologiques et les enjeux actuels, en montrant qu’elles ne forment pas un ensemble homogène d’approches ou de pratiques. Car non seulement il n’existe pas de visual studies « en général », mais ce terme unique recouvre trois niveaux de réalité sensiblement dissociés : une formation académique, une somme de travaux empiriques et théoriques, ainsi qu'un vaste métadiscours sur le champ qui nourrit sa propre mythologie. Par souci de clarté, le plan de la thèse désimbrique ces trois niveaux, et plutôt que de définir ce que sont les études visuelles, s’attache à expliquer ce qu’elles font. En se fondant sur l'étude suivie de textes précis, chacune des sections de la thèse envisage donc l'objet visual studies sous l'un de ses différents aspects : historique, théorique, académique, métathéorique, toutes cs dimensions étant coextensives de ce qui constitue les visual studies de façon globale. / It's been more than a generation since visual studies started to shake up scientific procedures and academic organizational structures, in the Anglo-American world and on a global scale. Working between and across disciplines, this research trend behaves like an interface where art history, poststructuralism, cultural studies and other area studies can meet and combine their critical strengths. By embracing both demotic and scholarly imageries, laying bare the axiology underlying such divisions, and challenging the ideology pertaining to knowledge itself, visual studies take on many guises, either as a scientific discourse, a critical activity or a form of political commitment. However, though often claiming a form of radical novelty, visual studies’ concerns should rather be considered part of a broader shift in the study of the function of images and visuality in contemporary sciences and societies.As visual studies are starting to work their way in the french scientific landscape, this dissertation will expose their epistemological grounds and current stakes, calling attention to the fact that they do not cohere into a consistent set of shared approaches or practices. First, visual studies « in general » do not exist. Second, the term encompasses three aspects only partly overlapping : an academic formation, a body of empirical and theoretical works, and a thriving metadiscourse endlessly feeding the field’s self-mythology. For the sake of clarity, the dissertation will offer to break down these three components. What’s more, rather than trying to define what visual studies actually are, it endeavors to explain what they do. Mostly based on the close reading of a series of texts, each section of the dissertation hence offers to look at visual studies from a specific viewpoint — historical, theoretical, academic or metatheoretical — all aspects constitutive of visual studies as such.

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In this thesis, I examine the Beatles’ five feature films in order to argue how undermining generic convention and manipulating performance codes allowed the band to control their relationship with their audience and to gain autonomy over their output. Drawing from P. David Marshall’s work on defining performance codes from the music, film, and television industries, I examine film form and style to illustrate how the Beatles’ filmmakers used these codes in different combinations from previous pop and classical musicals in order to illicit certain responses from the audience. In doing so, the role of the audience from passive viewer to active participant changed the way musicians used film to communicate with their fans. I also consider how the Beatles’ image changed throughout their career as reflected in their films as a way of charting the band’s journey from pop stars to musicians, while also considering the social and cultural factors represented in the band’s image. Such elements in the Beatles’ carefully constructed image reflected youth culture and countercultural thoughts and beliefs. Finally, through a close analysis of the Beatles’ musical sequences I have shown how experimentation with artistic synergy enabled the band to produce new and innovative films and lyrics while allowing each member to develop as individual musicians. This experimentation and willingness to undermine traditional film and pop music practices helped to change artists’ approaches in the entertainment industries.

For a long time, Roman ideal sculptures have primarily been studied within the tradition of Kopienkritik. Owing to some of the theoretical assumptions tied to this practice, several important aspects of Roman visual culture have been neglected as the overall aim of such research has been to gain new knowledge regarding assumed Classical and Hellenistic models. This thesis is a collection of three studies on Roman ideal sculpture. The articles share three general aims: 1. To show that the practice of Kopienkritik has, so far, not produced convincing interpretations of the sculpture types and motifs discussed. 2. To show that aspects of the methodology tied to the practice of Kopienkritik (thorough examination and comparison of physical forms in sculptures) can, and should, be used to gain insights other than those concerning hypothetical Classical and Hellenistic model images. 3. To present new interpretations of the sculpture types and motifs studied, interpretations which emphasize their role and importance within Roman visual culture. The first article shows that reputed, post-Antique restorations may have an unexpected—and unwanted—impact on the study of ancient sculptures. This is examined by tracing the impact that a restored motif ("Satyrs with cymbals") has had on the study of an ancient sculpture type: the satyr ascribed to the two-figure group "The invitation to the dance". The second article presents and interprets a sculpture type which had previously gone unnoticed—The satyrs of "The Palazzo Massimo-type". The type is interpreted as a variant of "The Marsyas in the forum", a motif that was well known within the Roman cultural context. The third article examines how, and why, two motifs known from Classical models were changed in an eclectic fashion once they had been incorporated into Roman visual culture. The motifs concerned are kalathiskos dancers, which were transformed into Victoriae, and pyrrhic dancers, which were also reinterpreted as mythological figures—the curetes. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Accepted. Paper 3: Accepted.</p>