The annual lecture will be given by:

Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay

The CUNY Graduate Center
Professor and Executive Officer, Liberal Studies
Professor, Anthropology, Classics, Digital Humanities, Middle Eastern Studies, Public Scholarship

Beyond the White City: Fantasy, Power and Ancient Architecture at America’s World’s Fairs, 1893–1915

Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 celebrated the quadricentennial of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas by creating a fantastical White City composed of Roman triumphal arches and domes, Corinthian colonnades, and Egyptian obelisks. World’s fairs were among the most important phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: millions visited and came away understanding the modernity and progress of these cities and the nascent superpower of the United States. But what they found was often a representation of the past. Ancient Greco-Roman and Egyptian architecture was deployed to create immersive environments at fairs held in Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco between 1893 and 1915. The seemingly endless adaptations of ancient architecture at these five fairs demonstrated that ancient architecture could symbolize and transmit the complex – and often paradoxical or contradictory – ideas that defined the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and still endure today. This talk will examine how ancient architecture was a powerful means for expressing the modernity of the United States by considering specific buildings from each of these fairs.

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATION:
Ancient Fantasies and Modern Power
Neo-Antique Architecture at American World's Fairs, 1893–1915

Our annual Spring lecture is the time when we conclude the year with a lecture, awarding of spring contest prizes and elections for the next year.