Wosk, Julie

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WOSK, Julie

PERSONAL: Born in Evanston, IL; married Bill Williams. Education: Attended Washington University, Harvard University, University of Wisconsin, School of the Art Institute, and Parsons School of Design.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Maritime College, State University of New York, 6 Pennyfield Ave., Fort Schuyler, Bronx, NY 10465. E-mail—readermail@juliewosk.com.

CAREER: Educator, author, and artist. Maritime College, State University of New York, Bronx, professor of art history, English, and studio painting; painter and photographer.

WRITINGS:

Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1992.

Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Julie Wosk, professor of art history, English, and studio painting at the Maritime College of the State University of New York, is also the author of two books about art history. Her first book, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century, examines the ways in which art, both high and functional, helped nineteenth-century Americans and Europeans to make sense of and adapt to their increasingly technology-filled world. In the first two chapters Wosk addresses the dialectical process of "fracturing and integration" that exists at the heart of nineteenth-century representations of technology, a process whereby artists both highlighted the traumatic effects of technology and tried to reconcile their viewers to it. The argument in these two chapters is "both subtle and forceful," Robert C. Post wrote in American Historical Review. In the final four chapters, Wosk examines the debates surrounding the use of technology to creative decorative objects, particularly useful ones such as tableware, and the decorative nature of the design of such technological artifacts as sewing machines and stationary steam engines.

Wosk returns to the subjects of art and technology in Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age. In this "complex, comprehensible and highly readable book," as it was described by a Publishers Weekly critic, Wosk examines the stereotypes of women and technology as shown by a range of media, from eighteenth-century paintings to twentieth-century advertising. "Although primarily pitched to scholarly readers, Wosk's study will also inform nonacademic readers," Whitney Scott noted in Booklist.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

American Historical Review, April, 1994, Robert C. Post, review of Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century, p. 526.

Booklist, December 15, 2001, Whitney Scott, review of Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, p. 688.

Choice, June, 2002, W. K. Bauchspies, review of Women and the Machine, p. 1791.

Isis, December, 1993, Rosalind Williams, review of Breaking Frame, pp. 814-815.

Publishers Weekly, November 26, 2001, review of Women and the Machine, p. 54.

Technology and Culture, July, 1994, Terrence L. Uber, review of Breaking Frame, pp. 638-639.

Technology and Learning, September, 2002, review of Women and the Machine, p. 72.