Elizabeth Lee, Dickinson College

In the Space Between Medicine and Art: Health, Illness, and Aesthetics in America's Gilded Age

This project places the artist's body front and center in the analysis of Gilded-Age aesthetics, showing how the production and experience of late nineteenth-century art was shaped by illness and the spread of epidemic disease and, in turn, how art functioned as therapy for artists and viewers alike in the decades following the rise and acceptance of germ theory in America.