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University of Southern California
University of Southern California
History

Faculty

Victoria Cain

Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow & Lecturer

Contact Information
E-mail: vcain@usc.edu
Phone: (213)740-4069
Office: VKC 342

 

Education

  • B.A. History and Literature, Harvard College, 1997
  • Ph.D. History, Columbia University, 2007

Academic Appointment, Affiliation, and Employment History

  • Visual Studies / Shoah Foundation Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual History, University of Southern California, 2009-2010   
  • Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, Spencer Foundation, 2008-2009   
  • Visual Studies / Shoah Foundation Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual History, University of Southern California, 2007-2008   
  • Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2006-2007   

Description of Research

Summary Statement of Research Interests
Victoria Cain studies the social, cultural and intellectual history of the late nineteenth and twentieth century United States. Her current work explores the popularization of knowledge, the politics of visual representation, and the ongoing struggle over intellectual and cultural authority in capitalist democracies. Trained at Columbia University, she was nominated for the Bancroft Dissertation Award and the Nevins Dissertation Award. Recently, she has been awarded fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Mellon Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. Dr. Cain is currently completing a book manuscript that builds upon her dissertation work. Co-authored with historian of science Karen Rader, “Life on Display: The Crusade to Define Science in Twentieth Century American Museums” analyzes museum display in order to examine the complicated historical relationship between educational institutions, federal science policy and the life sciences. "Life on Display" will be submitted to the University of Chicago in October 2009. Dr. Cain has also begun a second book project, provisionally titled “Worth a Thousand Words: Pictures, Picturing Technologies and the Making of Modern American Education, 1890-1950.” This book explores the status of the photograph in American education, and provides the first comprehensive history of visual education in the United States.

Publications

Book
  • Cain, V. E. "Worth a Thousand Words: Pictures, Picturing Technologies and the Making of Modern American Pedagogy, 1890-1950" (in progress).
  • Cain, V. E., Rader, K. A. "Life on Display: The Crusade to Define Science in American Museums".
Book Chapter
  • Cain, V. E. "The Tourism of Labor: Photography and Exhibit Making in the Early Twentieth Century" (in progress). Amsterdam University Press.
  • Cain, V. E. (2009). "The Art of Authority: Exhibits, Exhibit-Makers, and the Contest for Scientific Status in the American Museum of Natural History, 1920-1940," in Lay Observation in the Life Sciences (under review). Palgrave.
  • Cain, V. E. (2009). "‘Education, Broadly Interpreted’: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the Development of Educational Film, 1935-1946," in Learning with the Lights Off: A Reader in Educational Film. New York: Oxford University Press.
Essay
  • Cain, V. E. (2008). "Exhibitionary Complexity: Reconsidering Museums’ Cultural Authority". pp. 1143-1153. American Quarterly.
Journal Article
  • Cain, V. E. (2009). Show and Sell: Science Education and Commercial Aesthetics in Natural History Museums in the United States, 1900-1920 (under review). Paedagogica Historica.
  • Cain, V. E. (2009). Visual Education, Virtual Witnessing and the Deep Past (under review). Journal of Visual Culture. Vol. 10 (3)
  • Cain, V. E. (2009). "Specimens, Stereopticons and Science Education: The Evolution of the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences". Annals of Iowa. Vol. 68 (1), pp. 1-35.
  • Cain, V. E., Rader, K. A. (2008). "From Natural History to Science: Display and the Transformation of American Museums of Science and Nature, 1930-1968". museum and society. Vol. 6 (2), pp. 152-171.
Other
  • Cain, V. E. (2008). "'Mind' Games". Museum News.
  • Cain, V. E. (2008). "Photography in the Nude". Museum News.
  • Cain, V. E. (2007). "Simple Designs for Serious Needs". Museum News.

Multimedia Scholarship and Creative Works

  • www.hotchalk.com, Consultant for web-based history programming for NBC Universal. Wrote scripts, advised production team, supervised content development., 2007-2008   
  • http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/visualstudies/v, Led the production of the website for the Visualizing the Past Project, which aims to provide scholars with the access and information necessary to incorporate images into historical research. Resources include a library of collections of digitized imagery, an interactive bibliography of the history of visual culture, and a guide for citing images., 2008-2009   
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