Jeff Rosen writes on photography and the history of printing. His recent publications have focused on the work of Julia Margaret Cameron in relation to questions of colonialism and empire, the formation of British national identity, and the cultural symbolism of triumph and mourning as expressed in early photographs.
His most recent book is Julia Margaret Cameron: The Colonial Shadows of Victorian Photography (YUP, 2024), which examines the activities of Cameron and her literary and artistic circle, especially Thackeray, Tennyson, and the Pre-Raphaelites, in the aftermath of the 1857 Indian Rebellion.
His earlier book, Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects’: photographic allegories of Victorian identity and empire (MUP, 2017), was the first study of Cameron’s allegorical photographs and the first to examine the intellectual connections of this imagery to British culture and politics of the 1860/70s.
Jeff is a former professor of art history. As a former academic dean, he worked for three research universities in Chicago, and for the past 12 years, assured academic quality in colleges and universities through the process of accreditation as a vice president at the Higher Learning Commission. He is now a Scholar-in-Residence at the Newberry Library, Chicago.
