Project Description:

Overviews | Interfaces | Underworlds

This web project, to be developed by the students in an upcoming seminar, will trace the development of the urban imaginary in two distant cities over the course of a century. While attending closely to material artifacts, we will investigate how the modern experience in these respective cities is constituted by mediations, representations, conceptions, theorizations, fantasies, and repressions.

We focus on three levels of operation, and specific topics within them. Overviews include panoramas, maps, urban theory, planning and governance, collections and archives.  Interfaces comprise sites of social and cultural encounter, mixture, and reflection:  streets and arcades, commercial spaces, cabarets and teahouses, gardens, domestic interiors, exhibitions and art spaces, spectacles and theaters. and illustrated periodicals.  Underworlds are spaces of crime and violence, vice, addiction, fantasy, scandal and satire.

Related Course:

ArtHist 283A - "Shanghai/Paris: Urban Imaginaries, 1880-1940." (Spring 2006)

Core Personnel:

• Richard Vinograd, Christensen Professor in Asian Art, Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University
• Dr. Graham Larkin, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University

Graduate Researchers:

• Virginia Nicholson
• Jason Protass

Undergraduate Research Assistants:

• Julie Yen
• Suzy Katharine Tollerud

Web Development:

• Michael Gonzalez
• Jason Protass
• Virginia Nicholson