The Department of History of Art/Graduate Department of Art is delighted to announce that Associate Professor Jordan Bear has been awarded the 2016 Historians of British Art (HBA) book award for a single-authored work dealing with a post-1800 subject, for his book Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject. Awards were granted in three different categories, and the winners were chosen from a nominating list of over eighty books from more than thirty different presses. In Disillusioned, Bear tells the story of how photographic trickery in the 1850s and 1860s participated in the fashioning of the modern subject. By locating specific mechanisms of photographic deception employed by the leading mid-century photographers within this capacious culture of discernment, Disillusioned integrates some of the most striking—and puzzling—images of the Victorian period into a new and expansive interpretive framework. Bear has also been awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2016 Sonya Rudikoff Prize for best first book in Victorian Studies, awarded by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. Many congratulations on this achievement!
For more information on this year’s HBA Book Awards, please visit the Historians of British art website.
To find out more about Disillusioned, please visit the Penn State University Press website.
