Swann Fellow Lecture: Visual Culture and the Black Experience in Nineteenth-Century New York City

Jessica Larson, a PhD candidate at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, was among the Swann Fellow awardees selected in 2022 to speak at the Library. Her project, "Building Black Manhattan: Architecture, Art, and the Politics of Respectability, 1857-1914," examines the architecture of charitable and reform institutions built to serve Black aid recipients in Manhattan between the Civil War and World War I. Her interdisciplinary project involves the application of visual culture and the fine arts to reckon with archival gaps and to reconstruct the experiences of everyday life in nineteenth-century Manhattan. The Swann Foundation Fellowship, administered by the Library since 1999, features academics who use the collections of the Prints and Photographs Division, as well as other research areas of the Library to further their research related to caricature and cartoon. For transcript and more information, visit https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-10748