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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 at 7 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

Now more than ever the American Revolution and its legacies loom large for the American public. What did the Revolution mean for the people who lived through it? What should it mean for us today and what lessons should we draw from its memory? How might engagement with primary sources from the American Revolution help us participate in civil dialogue, appreciate the diversity of the American experience, and celebrate the common bonds that hold citizens together? We are hosting a roundtable discussion with the creators of two related public history endeavors seeking to make primary source texts and artifacts of our revolutionary past easily accessible to the public.

The Revolutionary City: A Portal to the Nation’s Founding is a website that provides a one-stop-shop for students, teachers, scholars, and lovers of history to learn about diverse stories of the American Revolution from the perspective of early residents of America’s revolutionary city. It makes available high-resolution images of historic documents from the American Philosophical Society (APS), the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), and the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP) so that readers can explore for themselves how Americans approached and lived through the upheaval, peril, and promise of revolution.

Join us as we meet with representatives from the archives who contributed to the portal and the creator of the public exhibit to discuss the portal, the exhibit, and the ongoing effort to inform the memory of the American Revolution and its legacies today.

Sponsored by the Program in Early American Economy and Society

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Thursday May 15th, 2025 at 7 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

Join us this evening to learn about Brooke Belisle’s recent book Depth Effects: Dimensionality from Camera to Computation (UC Press, 2024). During an era where emergent, AI-driven techniques of computational visual culture seem to unsettle or break from long standing frameworks of photographic representation, Belisle explores how an alternative history of photography can reframe current practices of computational imaging seen in object recognition, depth mapping, and photogrammetry. Her talk will show how early experiments in photographic aesthetics offer unexpected resources for navigating current transformations in visual culture, thinking about ways we use images to capture the three-dimensional shapes of things, that portray the contours of embodied identity, and map the terrain of geographical space. Moving between historical and contemporary case studies, she will touch on recent artworks that explore problems and potentials of dimensionality in visual mediation.

Brooke Belisle is Associate Professor of Art History and Criticism in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University, where she is also affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computational Science and the Alda Center for Communicating Science. Her first book, Depth Effects: Dimensionality from Camera to Computation (UC Press, 2024), connects emerging forms of computational imaging to aesthetic experiments in very early photography. Her current book project, Seeing Stars: Astronomical Media, traces changing techniques of visual mediation in the history of astronomy and astrophysics. Belisle studied 19th century visual culture as a fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and has also held fellowships from ACLS and the Getty. Her work can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of Critical Inquiry, LA+, and Photography and Culture.

Hosted by the Visual Culture Program