SLU American Studies Dissertation Wins Top Missouri History Prize

12/05/2022

A recent SLU doctoral dissertation from the Department of American Studies has been awarded the prestigious Lewis E. Atherton Dissertation Prize.

The winning dissertation is by Elizabeth Eikmann, Ph.D., who successfully defended the work at SLU last year. Eikmann’s American Studies dissertation is titled “In Her Image: Photography, Whiteness, and Womanhood in St. Louis, 1877–1920.” Committee members were Kate Moran, Ph.D., and Benjamin Looker, Ph.D., of the Department of American Studies, and Rachel Lindsey, Ph.D., of the Department of Theological Studies.

The Atherton Prize is given annually by the State Historical Society of Missouri (SHSMO) to honor the year’s most outstanding Ph.D. dissertation, from any institution worldwide, in areas related to the history of Missouri. 

“The Atherton Prizes support emerging scholars who are helping us to better understand our past and how it has shaped who we are today," said John Brenner, SHSMO managing editor. "We’re excited about Elizabeth’s work, and we’re eager to see where she will lead us.”

Eikmann’s work unearths the forgotten history of St. Louis as a preeminent North American center for the advancement of photography as an art form and technical craft in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It does this by exploring a group of white St. Louis women who innovated in this burgeoning yet male-dominated field—including magazine publishers, practitioners, portrait-studio owners, critics, and social-reform activists.

“In Her Image” details how these women pushed against sexist boundaries to establish an assertive voice in the photographic profession—meanwhile challenging prevailing gender norms more generally. At the same time, Eikmann finds, affirmations of whiteness, white social dominance, and US imperial ambitions were often integral to these professionals’ work. Consequently, their output, while seeming to break boundaries, frequently ratified and deepened the era’s existing racial hierarchies and racialized “ways of seeing.”

Eikmann accepted the Atherton Prize at this fall’s SHSMO Annual Meeting in Columbia, MO, in an event keynoted by US Sen. Roy Blunt. Eikmann is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Study of St. Louis and the American Story in the American Culture Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. She is now developing her prize-winning American Studies dissertation into a book manuscript.

“The photographers examined in the work—notably all women—made significant and previously understudied contributions to the establishing of American photography as an art, technology, and trade.," Eikmann said. "But their photographic works also further cemented the relationship between race, vision, and power, an important aspect of this project’s analysis that I hope will meaningfully contribute to the study of whiteness and American art.”