Professor: Green-Lewis Jennifer
Department: English
Title: Alice at the Microscope
Description: I’m in the early stages of drafting three essays on Victorian concepts of the miniature, the gigantic, and the distant, exploring how each was shaped by the advent of different visual technologies and made available for popular consumption and exchange through the advent of photography. My goal is to consider novelistic point-of-view in the context of reading practices that were daily occurrences for many middle-class Victorians. I would welcome some assistance gathering sources –writings in popular and scientific journals of the 1840s to the 1880s, for the most part (both British and American), but also novels and short stories of the period– in which specific photographic technologies, such as the microphotograph and the stereograph, are discussed or are present.
Duties:
- Go to Library of Congress (Reading room, as well as Prints and Photographs), Smithsonian, and other institutions as necessary to find articles in nineteenth-century periodicals and to track down holdings of microphotographs and other ephemera
- Use online sources to locate essays, articles, letters, and other writings; read and summarize
- Compile folder of sources with bibliographic information
Time commitment: 7-9 hours per week (average)
Credit hour option*: 3
Submit Cover Letter/Resume to: jmgl@gwu.edu
*If credit is sought, all registration deadlines and requirements must be met. Students selected to be research assistants should contact Ben Faulkner at benfaulkner@gwu.edu whether they intend to pursue credit or not.
