I am: an historian of the middle class; a generalist Americanist, with a subject-focus on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era; a teacher and strong believer in the humanistic values of teaching the history of everyday life; the proud, the anxious owner of a proud, anxious cocker spaniel; a writer who is perhaps overly attached to overwritten sentences with too many clauses.
More specifically, my work so far has focused on the interconnections between the formation of American middle-class cultural identity and the popularization of illustrated magazines in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. I work and teach with visual and material culture in addition to textbook archival matter. My academic work has been published by Rethinking History and The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. My dissertation (and, with any luck, my first book project) is a microhistory built around the life histories of Charles Dana Gibson and John Sloan, who came of age with the American middle class, and whose conceptions of how that class would work (particularly vis a vis gendered expectations of behavior) were at once constitutive and reflective of those of their middle-class peers. I am currently working on a shorter project featuring Maxfield Parrish’s contributions to a Ray Stannard Baker article about the American West before I move on from illustration to newer – and maybe even greener – pastures. I received my PhD from Columbia in the October of 2021.
Apart from my strictly academic pursuits, I have also done some curatorial work (both in real-life form and through digital humanities projects), and have done historical consulting with everything from a local historical society to a major prestige drama. You can find me geographically in Ithaca, New York, where I am currently stationed at Cornell as a postdoc, though I mostly can be found at either the arboretum or the Wegmans.
Josh Schwartz 