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.

For her new project on the challenge dance in Antebellum America, Masten 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.  She was also awarded a residential fellowship at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, Spring 2009.  

The Davis Center’s focus for the academic years 2008-09 and 2009-10 was the problem of “Cultures and Institutions in Motion.”  Masten’s project,  “The Challenge Dance: Transatlantic Exchange in Early American Popular Culture,” explores the form, content, and context of challenge dancing in the 1840s to show how the aesthetic and global movements of people contributed to the formation of America's cultural identity.  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, and African sailors, slaves, and immigrants moving through the Atlantic world. 

 

 

Publications

Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

“Shake Hands? Lilly Martin Spencer and the Politics of Art”, American Quarterly 56:2 (June 2004), 349-394. 

“Dancing Through American History,” Common-Place > www.common-place.org < vol. 6, no. 1, October 2005. 

“Model into Artist: The Changing Face of Art Historical Biography,” Women’s Studies 21: 1 (1992), 17-41. 

The Journal of American History, Reviews in American History, American National Biography, and Newsday.