George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Dr. Anne Strachan Cross is an art historian specializing in the art of the United States, with a focus on the histories of photography and the material culture of illustrated newspapers and magazines. In her writing and teaching, Cross critically engages the impact racial and gender bias has on the archival and narrative practices of history, and she employs innovative methodologies that create space for themes of recovery and redress, and the dynamics of absence and presence. Her research has appeared in the journals Panorama and History of Photography, and she was a contributor to the publication Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North (American Folk Art Museum, New York).

Her current book project examines photographs of atrocity and their publication as wood engravings within Harper’s Weekly’s illustrated reporting of the American Civil War. In her book, Cross examines how this popular New York-based newspaper used images of atrocity to both report the news and to further the journal’s political and rhetorical position. In so doing, this project grapples with issues such as the social construction of violence as news, the role of the media as moral arbiter, and the ethics of reproducing images of violence, particularly racialized violence, in mass visual culture.

Cross received her Bachelor’s degree from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study; her Master’s degree from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University; and her Ph.D. from the University of Delaware.