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In the late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century English domestic interior, games mediated and influenced the experience of age and masculinity. Games embodied, reflected, and shaped culture. Games united education, entertainment, and players’ imaginations inside the formative social environment of the home. The domestic interior was the catalyst that facilitated the agency of games. I explore the representation of age and masculinity in miniature images of boys, youth, and men in games and the agency of games as they interacted with players. I use three intersecting lenses: how people experience miniature objects; social interactions in domestic spaces; and the ability of an ordinary belonging to influence perceptions, ideas, and behaviour. In two case studies, I argue that games were serious cognitive technologies with agency that mediated and shaped players’ understanding of age and masculinity. In case one, I investigate the visuality, materiality, and experience of playing the didactic board game The New Game of Human Life (1790). The game consists of a battle between vice and virtue that males meet throughout the life stages. In case two, I analyze a series of five sets of paper dolls and their books published by Samuel and Joseph Fuller between 1810 and 1816. The male paper doll-book is an intermedial product that encourages players to imagine and act out adventures. In both cases, I argue games were active cognitive technologies that communicated with players. Games were visual and material culture that fashioned masculine identity. Games played in the domestic interior were communicative media designed to shape players’ ideas about masculine identity and their behaviour. / Graduate / 2022-08-10

Caroline Bonaparte Murat created an identity for herself through the art that she collected during the time of her reign as queen of Naples as directed by her brother, Napoleon, from 1808-1814. Through the art that she both commissioned and purchased, she developed an identity as powerful politically, nurturing, educated, fashionable, and Italianate. Through this patronage, Caroline became influential on stylish, female patronage in both Italy and France. Caroline purchased and commissioned works from artists such as Jean-August-Domonique Ingres, François Gérard, Elizabeth Vigée LeBrun, Antonio Canova and other lesser-known artists of the nineteenth century. Many of these works varied in style and content, but all helped in creating an ideal identity for Caroline. In all of the works she is portrayed as a powerful woman. She is either powerful by her settings (in the drawing room, or with Vesuvius in the background), her vast knowledge in the arts and fashion, her motherhood, her sensuality, or the way in which she is positioned and how she is staring back at the viewer within the works. The creation of this identity was uniquely Caroline's, mimicking Marie de Medici, Marie Antoinette and Josephine and Napoleon Bonaparte, while adding her own tastes and agendas to the creation. Through this identity she proved herself to be as equally French as Italianate through dress and surroundings. She even created a hybrid of fashion, wedding the styles together, by adding black velvet and lace to a simple empire-waisted silhouette. Caroline proved herself as politician, mother, educated and refined woman, pioneer in fashion, and Queen through the art that she purchased and commissioned.

In this dissertation, I seek to analyze events in the 1821 Greek and Romanian revolutions against Ottoman rule in the Balkans using a relational sociology perspective. I am mainly looking at the network position of various figures who played a role in the development of nationalist arguments and ideology, and positing that these figures combined the role of network-broker – a figure who straddles holes among tight knit communities – and cultural brokers – a concept from anthropology involving the promotion of ideas from a “wider world” into a smaller community. I try to show how various configurations of network position and cultural knowledge can be an important determining factor in the success of various revolutionary actions, as well as the ideologies that develop from those actions. This factor which can provide an alternative explanation to that posed by modernization or institutional theories. In Chapter 1, I focus on Lycurgus Logothetis, a cultural and network broker who liberated Samos from the Ottoman Empire, while provoking the massacre of Chios; following the thread of events to France, I show how this event intertwined with events in the French art world, to increase support for Greece. In Chapter 2, I focus on the Phanariots, a group of elite Greek Christians in the Ottoman Empire who used their contracts with abroad to gain a precarious position within the Empire, one that involved the rapid rise and fall of a number of brokerage figures from a small pool of candidates. In Chapter 3, I show how the rebellion against that system, the rebellion of Tudor Vladimirescu, succeeded in creating a nationalist impulse in Romania owing to Vladimirescu’s creation of a quasi-group of mainly Romanian speaking notables, separated from the Greek world, and beholden to his success, and the limitation of this rebellion in the lack of important contacts from abroad. In Chapter 4, I examine the case of Ali Pasha, the rebellious, modernizing Pasha who developed an important base of operations by making local village contacts and reducing the Klepht-Armatoli, an Ottoman institution that depended on appointment the most important bandit in the region as an Imperial agent to keep the peace; and again, show that Ali Pasha’s bid for independence failed because of limited network connections with the Great Powers. Chapter 5 deals with Alexander Mavrocordatos, the network and cultural broker who succeeded in creating a new Greek constitution at the cost of importing old patron-client relations into his new and modernizing state. Finally in Chapter 6, I show the test case of a “trickster”, Georgios Karaiskakis, who handles contradictions between various networks of meaning with sarcasm and deliberate taboo violation, thus “getting action” without needing to use network or cultural brokerage. At the end of these chapters, I hope to have developed a number of interrelated hypotheses about the interaction between network brokerage, cultural brokerage, and the way these operate among the edges of paradox and contradiction in social life.

The following is a case study in contemporary cancel culture through three cases of it in the nineteenth century. Lord Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Harriet Beecher Stowe serve as three prominent cases of cancel culture in their time period that are all closely linked to one another. Cancel culture changes the way that we study these figures and their writing in the modern day. This shows that although we believe that cancel culture is a new phenomenon with the rise of social media that is not the case. Cancel culture has been happening through time as a way for the public to enact social justice without getting the court involved. Cancel culture is a lesson in the public court of opinion. / Master of Arts / The following is a case study in contemporary cancel culture through three cases of it in the nineteenth century. Writers, Lord Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Harriet Beecher Stowe serve as three prominent cases of cancel culture in their time period that are all closely linked to one another. Cancel culture changes the way that we study these figures and their writing in the modern day. It highlights how cancel culture is not as black and white as people initially believe while also showing an unbiased explanation of what transpires when a person is canceled. This shows that although we believe that cancel culture is a new phenomenon with the rise of social media that is not the case. Cancel culture has been happening through time as a way for the public to enact social justice without getting the court involved. Cancel culture is a lesson in the public court of opinion.

In the nineteenth century, Orientalism functioned as a Western tool for dominating and restructuring the perception of the Orient. In France, where Orientalism found favor amongst artists, Orientalist works were produced in the literary and visual arts to inform and control the narrative about the East. Influenced by the Napoleonic imperial conquests and an increased French presence in the East, Orientalism became an integral movement in the French visual arts. The relationship between France and the Orient was one of power and domination, which was mirrored in that between the French and the Blacks. As a part of the Western perception of the Other, the black individual had a unique role in nineteenth-century France. To be black in nineteenth-century French society was to be a second-class citizen. The existence of slavery, the increase in French ethnography, and racism in French society objectified the black individual, turning them into another symbol of French power and conquest. The exploration of this project will focus on the symbolic representation of the black body in nineteenth-century Orientalist visual art. As two separate areas of exploration in Art History, Orientalism and Race Theory have seen growth in scholarship thanks to contemporary interests in race and post-colonial theory. However, the overlap between the two subject areas is limited in research. Through the analysis of black figures in nineteenth-century Orientalism, we can discover more about the role of the Black individual with respect to European society and the Eastern cultures in which they existed. This research project explores depictions of Blacks in nineteenth-century Orientalist art to clarify their societal roles and explore the imbalance of social perception and representation in nineteenth-century French society. This project will reveal the truths hidden within the depictions of the black form.

This thesis examines the issue of elementary school attendance in later nineteenth century Bradford. It seeks to do this by means of a little used source: the school log book. The focus of the study is on the experiences of head teachers who faced a constant struggle to achieve and maintain an acceptable level of attendance in Bradford where child employment in the flourishing textile industry had long been an inherent feature of working class life. It investigates broader issues affecting attendance in the context of prevailing social, cultural, religious, and economic factors. While the significant and influential pressures on attendance in Bradford were to be found elsewhere (for example, parental apathy; hostility to compulsory attendance; child labour; health and welfare), this investigation discovers that the town’s problems were compounded and made difficult by its phenomenal growth and rapid emergence by the middle of the nineteenth century as the undisputed capital of the world’s worsted manufacturing trade. It concludes that in the study of Victorian elementary school attendance Bradford deserves greater recognition in consideration of the tension between the demands of the most prolific half-time system of employment in the country, and prevailing attitudes to the introduction of universal elementary education in England and Wales.

This dissertation conducts the first systematic study of illustrated Shahnama manuscripts from Qajar Iran (1789-1925). The Shahnama is a Persian epic, composed by the poet Firdawsi (940-1020 or 1025) in the eleventh century. Over time, the Shahnama became the most frequently illustrated Persian text and manuscript copies of the epic continued to be made in nineteenth-century Iran. However, rather than studying the continued production of illustrated manuscripts, scholarship on Qajar Iran has thus far privileged monumental oil paintings, photography, and lithography. I propose that in nineteenth-century Iran, illustrated Shahnama manuscripts were a potent tool for the ruling class and other ambitious individuals to express and build their identity, lineage, and power, despite the availability of other—and more public—ways to communicate the same message. A vibrant network of manuscript painters, who also worked in other media, produced these illustrated Shahnama copies in dialogue with novel forms of cultural production. Specifically, I argue that illustrated manuscripts and lithographed editions of the epic were created by overlapping circles of artists and they demonstrate how Iran and India were part of a shared cultural zone. By explaining how these two media existed in a dialogical relationship, affecting one another, this project challenges the narrative of teleological progression from one medium to the next. I center my discussion around eleven illustrated Shahnama examples and examine the manuscripts both as individual units and as interrelated parts of a group. I focus on their contexts of production, including patronage, intended audience, and artist workshop and pedagogical relationships. In Chapter 1, I study two early-nineteenth-century illustrated manuscripts (Or. 4906 in the British Library and Lewis O.58 in the Free Library) and explain how each underscored the Qajars’ royal identity and dynastic legitimacy during a period of intense competition for the throne and territorial instability. Chapter 2 explains that military leaders and elite administrators were key drivers of illustrated Shahnama manuscript production. I anchor my discussion around MS 535 in the Matenadaran Library in Armenia to outline how non-royally-commissioned manuscripts mirror the patrons’ political aspirations. Chapter 2 also traces the shared motifs that link one manuscript to another and shows that Shiraz was a major production center for illustrated Shahnama manuscripts. The visual repetitions and adaptations I identify in these manuscripts show that the period’s landscape of artistic production was a tightly woven network of artists’ pedagogical and working relationships. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the Shahnama books from the latter half of the nineteenth century, including lithographed editions printed in Bombay and illustrated manuscripts made in Iran. Images in these books display the flexibility of the artists as they began to work on both manuscripts and lithographed books; developed unique compositions rooted in the cultural and economic ties connecting Shiraz and Bombay; and expressed artistic agency and authorship as they produced for a speculative market. The four chapters together offer a fresh perspective on the Qajar dynasty’s imperial and ideological usages of the epic, the period’s active non-royal patronage and vibrant workshop practices, and Qajar society’s cultural connections to India, all of which distinctively contributed to building a visual language unique to nineteenth-century Iran.

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