Past, Progress, and Printed Bazaars: Classical Reception and Advertising in Turn-of-the-Century American Magazines

During the Fellowship at the College, García Morcillo is working on a project that aims to study the strategies, encoded language of advertising in magazines edited between the 1890s and the 1920s in the cities of Buenos Aires and New York. Particular attention will be paid to uses of pre-modern and ancient themes and imageries in adverts that featured as instrumental co-producers in the construction of reputation, reliability and legitimacy of modern goods and brands. The rich, cultural ecosystem of magazines produced during this period in these two vibrant American metropoles on the Atlantic coast reflected rapid changes in the physiognomy of cities, including the impact of economic transformations and ideas connected to technological progress. The project, and the collaboration with Prof. Dr Florian Freitag seeks to demonstrate that magazines and urban ecosystems mutually impact each other. The project aims to contribute to other research initiatives from the UA Ruhr and to the AURORA-Hub “Cultures: Identities and Diversities”. It will further serve as a pilot initiative for the creation of the interdisciplinary research collaborative project “Multimodal Landscapes of Mediterranean Antiquity”. The first step of this network will be a workshop devoted to the study of reimagined ancient pasts in the cityscapes of Ruhr metropoles that will take place at the College.