Governance Chair
Jeff Rosen writes on the history of photography and the origins of photomechanical printing. His recent publications have focused on the work of the Victorian photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, in relation to questions of colonialism and empire, the formation of British national identity, and the cultural symbolism of triumph and mourning as expressed in Cameron’s allegorical photographs. He has published historical essays on the nineteenth century works of Alfred Stieglitz, Eugene Atget, John Thomson, and others, and a long bibliography of historical work on the origins of photolithography and photomechanical reproduction in France.
His most recent book was Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects’: photographic allegories of Victorian identity and empire (MUP, 2017). A recent essay on Cameron’s 1871 exhibition in the waiting room of Brockenhurst railway station, published in The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces (ed. Murgia and Bauer; AUP, 2021), examined how her photographs joined Britain’s colonial periphery to its imperial center. And a new book, currently under review, examines the activities of Cameron and her circle, especially Thackeray, Tennyson, and the Pre-Raphaelites, in the aftermath of the 1857 Indian Rebellion.
Jeff is a former professor of art history at Columbia College Chicago. He worked as a former academic dean in three research universities in Chicago, including Northwestern University, The University of Chicago, and Loyola University Chicago. He now works at the Higher Learning Commission, the largest regional accreditor in the United States, as Vice President for Accreditation Relations and Director of the Open Pathway.