Ph.D. Minor
Program Description
For more than a half-millennium, people have been informed and influenced by print, sometimes for common purposes, sometimes for different purposes. In recent years scholars around the world from a variety of academic disciplines who study this phenomenon have begun calling it "book" or "print culture history." Primarily, they want to know how print--one of humankind's major means of communicating--has historically been available to and appropriated by diverse societies and cultures.
Since 1980 the field has generated a sizable literature, and with the establishment of this Ph.D. minor in 1998, the study of print culture history has found an institutional home within the University of Wisconsin-Madison's curricular structure. The Ph.D. Minor in Print Culture History gives graduate students opportunities to design a curriculum around the historical study and sociology of print culture within their general Ph.D. studies. The Program particularly encourages students to work in the extensive relevant collections held by the library systems of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society.
The Program's home is the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America, a joint program established in 1992 by the Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where it is located in the School of Library and Information Studies. The Center sponsors a colloquium series, an annual lecture, and a biennial conference on themes related to print culture history.
Like the study of print culture itself, the Minor is intentionally flexible. Students are required to take a minimum of EIGHTEEN CREDITS in courses whose subjects may range from the history of mass communications, cartography, literature, education, consumer movements, and library and information studies, to subjects dealing with gender, race, age, social class, and sexual orientation issues.
Examples include:
- Afro American Studies/Educational Policy Studies/History 567: History of African American Education.
- Consumer Science 470: History of Consumer Movements in the United States.
- Educational Policy Studies/History 412: History of American Education.
- Educational Policy Studies/History 903: History of Education of Multicultural America.
- English/Afro American Studies 662: Selected Topics in Multicultural American Literature.
- English 845: 19th-Century Transatlantic Fiction and Popular Culture.
- History 302: History of American Thought Since 1859.
- History/Religious Studies 334: The Reformation (Underlines the importance of print to the Reformation).
- Journalism/History 560: History of Mass Communication.
- Journalism/History 819: History of Mass Communication.
- Library & Information Studies/History/Journalism 570: History of Books and Print Culture.
- Library & Information Studies 622: Children's Literature.
- Library & Information Studies 629: Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults.
- Library & Information Studies 631: Young Adult Literature.
- Library & Information Studies 642: Reading Interests of Adults.
- Library & Information Studies 839: Special Collections, Topic: Rare Books.
Students are also expected to take at least SIX CREDITS OF SEMINAR STUDIES.
Examples include:
- History/Educational Policy Studies 906: Proseminar in the History of Education.
- Journalism/History 919: Seminar on the History of Mass Communication.
- Library & Information Studies 950: Seminar in the Foundations of Library and Information Science.
For a List of Upcoming Print Culture Courses, click here.
Admission
The Ph.D. Minor in Print Culture History is an interdisciplinary program functioning under the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School's Option A rules. To qualify, students will need written approval from their major advisor and from the Director, Ph.D. Minor in Print Culture History.
Faculty
Rima Apple (Professor, School of Human Ecology; Women's Studies Program, ( 608) 263-9354, rdapple@consci.wisc.edu) focuses her research on how women in the 19th and 20th centuries used women's magazines to advise and inform their sisters about child care and health issues, and how print culture has been used historically to shape consumer issues and empowerment.
James L. Baughman (Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, (608) 263-3390, baughman@wisc.edu ) is author of Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media and The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking and Broadcasting in American Since 1941, both of which deal with modern American magazines and newspapers, and shifts in the audience of print culture.
Charles L. Cohen (Professor of History & Religious Studies; Director, Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions, (608) 263-1956, clcohen@wisc.edu), is co-editor of Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America. He is the author of "The Liberty or Death Speech: A Note on Religion and Revolutionary Rhetoric," William and Mary Quarterly (1981), 702-717, and numerous other publications. He is particularly interested in the print culture of 17th and 18th century British North America.
James P. Danky (Faculty Associate in Journalism, Afro-American Studies, School of Library and Information Studies; Former Director, Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America; Newspapers and Periodicals Librarian, Wisconsin Historical Society, (608) 264-598, jpdanky@wisc.edu) has co-edited Print Culture in a Diverse America, an anthology growing out of the Center' first national conference in May 1995. His current research interests are African-American newspapers and periodicals and the American Right since 1960.
Suzanne Desan (Associate Professor, Department of History, (608) 262-8694, smdesan@wisc.edu) is author of Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France. She is particularly interested in the transition from oral to written culture in early modern Europe and in the explosion of print culture in revolutionary France.
Greg Downey (Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Studies, (608) 225-3809, gdowney@facstaff.wisc.edu) is the author of Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology, and Geography, 1850-1950. His area of research and teaching is the history and geography of information/communication technology and labor.
Anne Lundin (Professor, School of Library and Information Studies, (608) 265-4733, alundin@wisc.edu), an historian of children's literature, researches children's literature/children's librarianship. The author of Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crance, Randolph Caldecott, and Kate Greenway, co-author of a Center publication, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of Children's Literature, and author of the 2004 book, Constructing the Classics of Children's Literature: Beyond Library Walls and Ivory Towers.
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (Assistant Professor, Department of History, (608) 890-1340, ratnerrosenh@wisc.edu) is interested in the history of philosophy, political and social theory, religion, literature, and the visual arts; the transatlantic flow of intellectual and cultural movements; and print culture in modern America. She teaches courses on United States’ thought and culture, which seek to examine American intellectual and cultural life from a transnational perspective, and is the author of “Conventional Iconoclasm: The Cultural Work of the Nietzsche Image in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History (December 2006), 728-754, and “‘Dionysian Enlightenment’: Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche in Historical Perspective,” Modern Intellectual History (August 2006), 239-269.
William J. Reese (Professor, Department of Educational Policy Studies; Department of History, (608) 262-2812/ 608-263-2319, wjreese@wisc.edu) is mainly interested in the history of childhood and American and European educational systems. His interest in print culture arose through his research and teaching on the history of literacy, reading, and school textbooks. His most recent book is America's Public Schools: From the Common School to 'No Child Left Behind' (2005).
Robin Rider (Curator of Special Collections, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Senior Lecturer, History of Science, ( 608) 262-2809, rrider@library.wisc.edu ) has been interested in the printed history of science since receiving her Ph.D. in 1980. Her current research project is Printing and the New Book of Nature.
Michael H. Shank (Professor, Department of the History of Science, (608) 262-3972, mhshank@wisc.edu ) has a primary research focus on 14th and 15th century science, especially astronomy, with interests in the diffusion of learning, and the relationship between manuscript and print from 1350 to 1700. His current research centers on the Nuremberg press of the astronomer Johannes Regiomontanus (1471-76) and its relationship with German printers in Italy.
Lee Wandel (Assistant Professor, Department of History, (608) 263-1661, lpwandel@facstaff.wisc.edu ) is an expert in 16th century woodcuts, engravings and pamphlets. She is author of Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli' Zurich (1990), and Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (1995). Her current research project encompasses how media (including printed media) treated the Eucharist.