PRINTS OF A NEW KIND: POLITICAL CARICATURE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1789-1828 WITH ALLISON STAGG

Join us on Friday, September 15 for a free talk, reception  and book signing with scholar Allison Stagg. Her first book  Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States details the political strategies and scandals that inspired the first generation of American caricaturists to share news and opinions with their audiences in shockingly radical ways. Stagg examines printed caricatures that mocked the current events reported in newspapers and politicians in the United States’ fledgling government. Her presentation will highlight how politicians were frequently satirized in the 18th and 19th century and shed light on the artists who lampooned them. Among the artists she profiles is James Akin whose scalding caricature criticizing the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings influenced later artists and serves as the cover for her book.

Allison M. Stagg is a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and British visual culture. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from University College London and her undergraduate degree from Mary Washington College. Her post-doctoral research has been supported by fellowships from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. She has published widely on the subject of historical American and British caricature, with recent articles in Print Quarterly and Imprint: the Journal of the American Historical Print Collector’s Society. She has taught early American history and art history at several German universities and in 2016 she held the Terra Foundation Visiting Professorship in American Art History at the Freie Universität in Berlin. She is currently a research associate in the Department of Architecture and Art History at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany.

Her first book Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature published in the United States, 1789-1828 received generous publishing support from the College Arts Association, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, and the American Historical Print Collectors Society. It was published in April by Pennsylvania State University Press.