Near East to Far West: A Closer Look

9 am: Check-in and late registration; coffee and breakfast snacks served in the Sharp Auditorium Lobby (Hamilton Building, Lower Level).

10 am: Welcome by JR (Jennifer R.) Henneman, Director and Curator, Petrie Institute of Western American Art. Opening remarks by Patricia Limerick, Professor of History of the American West, University of Colorado Boulder.

10:25–11:10 am: Jennifer Olmsted, Shifting Visions, Divided Allegiances: French Images of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, 1798-1848

11:10-11:20 am: Break

11:20 am-12:05 pm: Emily Burns, Performing Indigeneity in U.S. World’s Fairs, 1893-1904

12:05-1:30 pm: Lunch (includes a sandwich, chips, cookie, and water) in Sturm Grand Pavilion, located on the second floor of the Martin Building. Please proceed to the second floor of the Hamilton Building and walk across the bridge. Sturm is located directly across the bridge.

1:30-1:35 pm: Lectures resume with remarks by Patricia Limerick

1:35-2:20 pm: Christine Garnier, Proctor in Paris: Menageries, Antiquities, and Imperial Hunts

2:20-2:30 pm: Break

2:30-3:15 pm: Robert Warrior, Orientalism, Romanticism, and the Challenges of Viewing Art Critically

3:15-4 pm: Panel discussion with select Q&A

4-5 pm: Happy Hour. Refreshments and light snacks served immediately following the symposium in the Sharp Auditorium Lobby and Congdon Boardroom.

Dr. Jennifer W. Olmsted
Associate Professor of Art History at Wayne State University

Dr. Jennifer W. Olmsted focuses on 19th-century French art with particular emphases on the fashioning of masculinity in French art and on French representations of North African and Eastern Mediterranean cultures. Her first book manuscript, Delacroix’s Moroccans: Art and Masculinity (now under review) examines the intersection of gender, race, and imperialism in Eugène Delacroix’s representations of Arab men from his famous trip to Morocco in 1832. She is currently working on a second book that explores how French artists and sitters used portraiture to stake claims to elite status during the tumultuous first half of the nineteenth century.

Dr. Emily C. Burns
Director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of the Art of the American West and an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma.

Emily C. Burns is a scholar of transnational nineteenth century art history, with an interdisciplinary research practice that analyzes how mobilities of objects and people shape visual culture in the context of global discourses of nationalism and modernism by focusing on points of contact across multiple communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is author of Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France, published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2018, and co-editor of Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts, published by Routledge in 2021. She has published numerous articles about U.S. art in Paris, the circulation of Lakota performers and art, and U.S. impressionism.

Dr. Christine Garnier
Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, University of Southern California

Christine Garnier specializes in the histories of art, material circulation, and the environment in the United States, with a particular focus on the Intermountain West. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript on nineteenth-century silver objects that are connected to the rise and fall of the silver mining industry in the nineteenth century. By analyzing a range of media––from exposition sculptures to Diné silver jewelry––the project analyzes how silver’s formal and material qualities became a multi-vocal site to advance nationalistic rhetoric, critique extractive industry, and assert sovereignty in this period. Her research has been supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Huntington Library, and the Center for Craft, among others. Christine holds a BS in mathematics from the Catholic University of America, an MA in art history from Tufts University, and received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California.

Robert Warrior (Osage)
Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature & Culture at the University of Kansas

Robert Warrior is the author of Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and coauthor of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New Press, 1996), American Indian Literary Nationalism (University of New Mexico Press, 2008), and Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). He was president of the American Studies Association and was the founding president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (2009-10). He was the founding co-editor of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAISA’s journal) and edits the Indigenous Americas series at the University of Minnesota Press. Before moving to the University of Kansas, he taught at Stanford, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Illinois. In 2018, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.