The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film

During the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, a range of iconic female forms emerged to dominate the global pictorial landscape. Female athletes and adventurers, chorine stars, flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, suffragettes, and trampky were all facets of the dazzling and urbane New Woman who came to epitomize modern femininity in photographs and on film. This construct existed as a set of abstract ideals, even as it varied when translated across national contexts and through a range of key historical moments including First Wave feminism, colonialism, the First and Second World Wars, political revolutions, and the rise of modernism.

This panel, moderated by art historian Linda Nochlin, will examine the nuances of visual representations of this transgressive and border-crossing figure from her inception in the later nineteenth century to her full development in the interwar period and beyond.

Kristine Harris is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Asian Studies Program at the State University of New York at New Paltz and recently was a Visiting Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

Linda Nochlin, moderator, is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Elizabeth Otto, assistant professor in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, is an art historian who focuses on issues of gender, visuality, and media culture in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in Germany and France.

Vanessa Rocco is an adjunct assistant professor in the History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute.

Clare I. Rogan is Curator of the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, where she also teaches courses on history of photography, the history of prints, and museum studies.

Sponsored by the Barnard Center for Research on Women and the             Barnard Center for Toddler Development.