April F. Masten



April Masten is Associate Professor of American History at Stony Brook University. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University, an M.A. in the Social History of Art from Leeds University, and a B.A. in Music from San Francisco State University.
E-Mail
april.masten@sunysb.edu
Office
SBS S-313
Phone
631-632-7483
Fax
631-632-7367
Research Interests
Masten’s scholarship explores the interplay between cultural production and political economies. Her article “Shake Hands? Lilly Martin Spencer and the Politics of Art,” which won the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association 2005 Article Prize, connects the nationalism inspired by Jacksonian democracy to the success and decline of a female visual artist. Her book, "Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York" (Penn Press, May 2008), reconnects the accomplishments of the hundreds of women artists who studied and worked in New York City between 1850 and 1880 to the city's conspicuously democratic art institutions, burgeoning illustrated press, and the prevailing aesthetic ideal - the Unity of Art.

In 2005 Masten was invited by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals to speak on the challenges of interdisciplinary writing at the Modern Language Association Conference in Washington D.C. Her current research explores the exchange of dance and music among African, Irish, and Native North Americans.
Publications
Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, May 2008. Book page URL: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14454.html

“Shake Hands? Lilly Martin Spencer and the Politics of Art”, American Quarterly 56:2 (June 2004), 349-394. href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_quarterly/v056/56.2masten.pdf

“Dancing Through American History,” Common-Place > www.common-place.org < vol. 6, no. 1, October 2005. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/cp/vol-06/no-01/school/

“Model into Artist: The Changing Face of Art Historical Biography,” Women’s Studies 21: 1 (1992), 17-41. http://search.ebscohost.com.libproxy.cc.stonybrook.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&bquery=JN+%22Women's+Studies%22+and+DT+19920301&type=0&site=ehost-live

The Journal of American History, Reviews in American History, American National Biography, and Newsday.
Blog by April F. Masten

Masten at Davis Center

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

April Masten, Associate Professor of American History at SUNY Stony Brook, has been awarded a highly competitive resident fellowship at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University for the Spring 2008 semester.

The Davis Center was named in honor of an alumnus who provided a generous gift to ensure the continuance of excellence in scholarship and the teaching of history at Princeton.  Each year, about a half-dozen scholars are chosen to participate in the seminar and pursue research related to a particular theme.

The Center’s focus for the academic years 2008-09 and 2009-10 is the problem of “Cultures and Institutions in Motion.” Issues to be studied include the diffusion of religious and cultural practices; the migration of technologies and objects; the circulation of ideas, traditions and aesthetic forms; the transfer of policies and legal practices; and the dynamics of traveling social movements.

The title of Masten’s project is “The Challenge Dance: Transatlantic Exchange in Early American Popular Culture,” which explores the form, content, and context of challenge dancing in Antebellum America to show how the aesthetic and global movements of people contributed to the formation of national identities.  Part theatre, part sport, challenge dances were jigging contests among white and black men, and sometimes women.  They took place on street corners and plantations, in halls and taverns, and in theatres and circuses as part of blackface minstrel shows. Challenge dances drew large, raucous crowds and were viewed, judged, and bet on like boxing matches.  These matches were the product of decades of exchange among Irish, English, African and Dutch sailors, slaves, and immigrants throughout the Atlantic world. 

Masten, who has taught at Stony Brook since 2001, specializes in the relationship between culture and political economies. For this project, she has received a John M. Ward Fellowship in Dance and Music for the Theatre from Harvard University’s Houghton Library, a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society, and a John Hope Franklin Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society for research travel to Ireland and England.

Since its inception, the Davis Center’s primary role has been to conduct a weekly seminar in which members of the faculty, visitors from other institutions, graduate students and selected undergraduates participate. For a period of two years, the Center focuses on a specific theme or aspect of history. Emphasis is placed on interdisciplinary approaches and subjects that span different geographical areas or periods.

The new director of the Davis Center Daniel Rodgers has been a member of the Princeton faculty since 1980.  His specialty is American ideas and culture, about which he has written several books.  Rogers has also held several fellowships, been a Fulbright lecturer in Germany and Japan, taught at Cambridge University, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 for his project entitled, “Transformation in Social Thought in 1980s America.”

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