Retro Readings
The Gilded Age
This course uses the HBO series The Gilded Age as a lens through which to explore the late nineteenth-century United States. Topics and figures include the rise of big business and philanthropy, Oscar Wilde’s queer aesthetics, the founding of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the emergence of the Black press, American imperialism, cultural debates about “decadence,” and the development of the museum movement.
HNRS 301H1
Jennifer Greenhill and Kelvin Parnell Jr.
Fall 2026
W 3:45-5 p.m.
GEAR 243
No application required.
Jennifer A. Greenhill specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. art and visual culture, while frequently extending her work beyond this period to examine subjects such as the visuality of literary humor and the politics of racialized beauty in 1960s film. She is the author of Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (University of California Press, 2012) and co-editor of A Companion to American Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), a volume of 35 essays that contest and expand the geographic, historiographic, material, and conceptual boundaries of the field.
Greenhill’s current book project, Commercial Imagination: American Pictorial Selling in the Age of Advertising Psychology (under contract with University of California Press), investigates how commercial artists, art directors, advertisers, and psychologists collaborated around 1900 to develop new visual strategies for suggestive advertising. By placing the U.S. advertising industry in dialogue with contemporaneous developments in Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and beyond, the book examines how emerging psychological research shaped advertising design and situates today’s digital sales techniques within this longer history. Key figures and entities include Maxfield Parrish, Kodak, and Hugo Münsterberg.
Kelvin Parnell Jr.’s scholarship centers the visual and social histories of sculpture in the United States, situating sculptural production and reception within multiple regimes of value. His work interrogates the relationships among material commodities, three-dimensional art, and evolving racial discourses in the nineteenth century. Core themes in his research include U.S. art and politics, sculptural theory, and transatlantic visual culture.
His current book project examines the intertwined roles of materiality, economics, race, and sculpture, offering a new account of how American bronze sculpture—in the making and viewing of statuettes, life-size works, and public monuments—functioned as a socializing mechanism that constructed, reinforced, and legitimized gender and racial hierarchies in the United States. Extending this analysis beyond sculpture, the project considers the broader image economies connected to the nation’s bronze industry, including literature, printed reproductions, and ephemera.
Women and Religion in America
This course deepens students’ understanding of American religious history and women’s history by examining religious pluralism and its impact on the American experience. Using primary and secondary sources, students explore how race, gender, geography, and socio-economic status intersect with religious life, with gender serving as a central analytical lens.
Topics include Native American and African American faith traditions, colonial religious practices, revival movements, nineteenth-century piety, and social justice initiatives from the Second Great Awakening to the present.
HNRS 301H1
Janet Allured
Fall 2026
W 12:30-1:45 p.m.
GEAR 129
No application required.
The course also evaluates the consequences of excluding women from religious authority and considers how queer theology challenges and reinterprets traditional religious narratives.
Janet Allured, Ph.D. is a retired professor of History and Women’s Studies at McNeese State University and the University of Arkansas. A specialist in southern women’s history, she has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, including Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times (2009) and Remapping Second-Wave Feminism: The Long Women’s Rights Movement in Louisiana, 1950–1997 (2016). Her most recent publication, Southern Methodist Women and Social Justice: Interracial Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (2025), co-edited with M. Kathryn Armistead, reflects her current research focus.
Allured and Elizabeth Payne have co-authored the forthcoming book Showers of Blessing: The Story of Myrtle Lawrence, Sharecropper and Social Activist, and the Photography of Louise Boyle. She is also at work on a monograph examining the domestic missionary efforts of southern Methodist laywomen.