Ima[gin]ing Nomadic Horizons: Early Photographic Projects of the Steppe & Plains People

CESSI Lecture Series: "Ima[gin]ing Nomadic Horizons: Early Photographic Projects of the Steppe & Plains People"

Heather Sonntag, CREECA Honorary Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison  

When: Tuesday, June 30, 4:00pm

Where: 2190 Grainger Hall

Sponsors: Central Eurasian Studies Summer Institute  

About the speaker: Dr. Heather S. Sonntag is a CREECA Honorary Fellow, independent scholar and curator of the early history of photography on Russian colonial Central Eurasia. She received her doctorate at UW-Madison in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, and has conducted research in a number of national and international archives over the past 15 years. Her work has been supported by a Fulbright fellowship, NCEEER grant, numerous university grants, and a Library of Congress internship, on which she helped with the digital preservation project and online catalog of the Turkestan Album. In 2013, she was invited to curate an exhibit for the US Mission to Kazakhstan, which opened in Almaty and Astana in 2014 with a catalog. Her current book project is on the production history of the Turkestan Album, and she has a forthcoming chapter on Central Asian colonial photography and seeing in a publication on Russian history of the senses (Bloomsbury Academic Press).

About the lecture: Dr. Sonntag will discuss the exhibition, Native Lands, which she curated as a commission from the US Mission in Kazakhstan in 2013. The exhibition compares traditionally nomadic peoples from the Steppes and Great Plains represented in historic photography found in digital collections of the Library of Congress. The images are curated from two monumental projects -- The Turkestan Album (ca. 1870) and The North American Indian (1900-1930) -- which documented these cultures at critical times during Russian and European American expansionism, respectively.