Acknowledgments
Many voices sound in my head as I write these acknowledgments. One of the earliest belongs to Alex Nemerov, whose graduate seminar on deconstruction and the visual arts at Stanford, twenty years ago, planted the seeds for my chapter on Thomas Cole, and indeed for the book as a whole. There are also the voices of colleagues and students at the University of Minnesota, where I have benefited from conversations made possible by the Atlantic History Workshop, the Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World, the Center for Early Modern History, and the Theorizing Early Modern Studies research collaborative and my coconspirators in that group: J. B. Shank, Juliette Cherbuliez, and Matthias Rothe. In my own department, Jane Blocker and Jennifer Marshall have listened attentively to my thoughts and generously shared their own. This project has also taken shape in dialogue with colleagues from beyond my own university: Rachael DeLue, Christopher Heuer, Matthew Hunter, Jessica Keating, Dian Kriz, Jason LaFountain, Craig Lee, Jennifer Roberts, Rose Marie San Juan, Bronwen Wilson, Angela Vanhaelen, and many others. I owe a special thanks to Tom Conley and to two anonymous readers for their insightful readings of the manuscript.
The knowledge and generosity of curators and archivists have made my research possible. I wish to thank Maggie Ragnow at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, Marie-Catherine Sahut at the Louvre, Jennifer Vanim at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Josie Walters-Johnston in the Moving Image Section at the Library of Congress, Caitlyn Haynes at the National Anthropological Archives in Washington, D.C., and Mindy Besaw and Ali Demorotski at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where I completed my manuscript while in residency as a Tyson Scholar. Research for the book was also supported by two Imagine Fund grants from the University of Minnesota. Funding for digital publication has been made possible by a TOME Open Access Monograph Initiative Award. I am grateful to my editor at University of Minnesota Press, Pieter Martin, for his encouragement and for so expertly shepherding this project through publication. And finally, I wish to thank Kerry Morgan, whose voice has been the most supportive and enduring of all.