Walter Benjamin for Historians

Abstract

Vanessa R. Schwartz is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern California. A historian of modern visual culture, she is the author of Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (1998) and co-editor with Leo Charney of Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (1995). She received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked under the direction of Susanna Barrows and Thomas Laqueur. Walter Benjamin stands at the crossroads of her abiding interest in urban culture and the history of film and other visual media. Schwartz is currently co-editing a reader on the history of visual culture in the nineteenth century and working on a full-length study of clichés of “Frenchness” in French and American visual culture in the 1950s.