Jeff Rosen

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 is Julia Margaret Cameron: The Colonial Shadows of Victorian Photography (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 2024). This work follows his earlier book, Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects’: photographic allegories of Victorian identity and empire (Manchester University Press, 2016/17). 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; Amsterdam University Press, 2021), examined how her photographs joined Britain’s colonial periphery to its imperial centre. And a new study called "Pattle Family Allegories", is in preparation for a forthcoming exhibition at the Watts Gallery, Compton, UK. Jeff is a former professor of art history at Columbia College Chicago. As a former academic dean, he worked for three research universities in Chicago, including Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and Loyola University Chicago. He then worked for the Higher Learning Commission, the largest regional accreditor in the USA, as Vice President for Accreditation Relations and Director of the Open Pathway. Now he is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Newberry Library, Chicago, where he continues to write on the history of photography.