Remembering the War: The Field Artist and Panorama Lecturer

The German Department welcomed Dr. Vance Byrd (Grinnell College) to a virtual lecture highlighting how German and American field artists for illustrated periodicals during the Franco-Prussian War and the American Civil War played an unexpected yet crucial role in the development of painted panoramas and helped bring about the emergence of the panorama lecturer after Reconstruction. While pictorial realism is typically highlighted as a significant illusionistic feature of panoramas, the panorama lecturer is just as important for an effective immersive experience. Yet panorama lecturers were not neutral narrators. Rather than explaining the actual causes of the American Civil War, they led audiences to interpret the past according to the values of the national family and valor. 

Dr. Vance Byrd is the Frank and Roberta Furbush Scholar and Chair of the German Studies Department at Grinnell College. He investigates how literary and print culture intersect with the history of visual media. He has published on topics related to the history of books and periodicals, critical race theory, museum studies, environmental humanities, commemoration, and graphic novels. His first book, A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture (2017) was published in the New Studies in the Age of Goethe series at Bucknell University Press. In addition to articles and book chapters, Byrd has published two co-edited books titled Market Strategies and German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020) and Before Photography: German Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (2021), as well as two journal special issues. He is working on a second monograph, Listening to Panoramas: Sonic and Visual Cultures of Commemoration, and a co-edited collection titled Queer Print Cultures. In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship, and he will hold residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center, Duke University, and at the Getty Research Institute in 2021–2022.