Peter Christensen, assistant professor of art history, will be able to use images like this one in his forthcoming book Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure (Yale University Press, 2017) with the help of a SAH/Mellon Author Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. The award helps defray the high cost of image acquisitions for scholarly monographs on the history of the built environment. Christensen’s book shows how the late 19th-early 20th century German-designed train stations, bridges, and other structures along the Ottoman Railway from Bosnia to Baghdad bear not only the trademarks of imperialism, but also incorporate elements of emergent nationalism. “In an increasingly challenging publishing environment, it is a real honor to receive this support from the Society of Architectural Historians and the Mellon Foundation for art historical scholarship, which often requires the production of large amounts of images and figures,” Christensen says. “With this support, I will be able to provide the full range of visual evidence of my argument.” The photograph above, taken by Guillaume Gustave Berggren, shows the Anatolian Railway tunnel at Bekdemir, ca. 1893. (Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Wolfenbüttel.)
The Arts
