Eric Sandweiss

• Carmony Chair and Associate Professor, Department of History
• Editor, Indiana Magazine of History

Education

• A.B. at Harvard University, 1981
• Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley, 1991

Contact Information

Ballantine Hall, Rm. 822

(812) 855-0210

Background

As a person, I take great interest in the ordinary people and experiences that shape our lives: the everyday structures that we drive past on our way to the monument; the unfamiliar music that confronts us as we turn the radio dial toward our station; the forgotten person whose letters we discover in our search for the politician or the celebrity.

As a historian, I ask: How do these everyday people and experiences add up to the larger patterns by which we identify a culture? How do those patterns then dissolve and transform themselves anew? My search for answers takes me in two directions: first, to the built environment and the people who have shaped, described, and pictured it; and second, to the matter of how history itself is told and understood. Both of these efforts draw on my earlier experiences in historic preservation, urban planning, and museum work. Here at IU, the job of editing the Indiana Magazine of History gives me an opportunity to continue to work around the “margins” of historical practice, as I collaborate with both professional historians and public audiences to shape a fresh discussion about what this region’s history mean to us as we look to our future.

I look forward to working with students who are interested in cities, landscape, material culture, music, public history, writing and editing, and the vexed question of just what is a Hoosier.

Selected Awards

• Research Grant, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
• Summer Stipend, National Endowment for the Humanities
• Best Dissertation Prize, Urban History Association
• Joan Patterson Kerr Award, Western History Association
• Postdoctoral Fellowship, Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University

Research Interests

• Cultural landscape studies
• Urban history
• Architecture
• Public history and museums
• Visual culture
• American popular music
• Indiana

Courses Recently Taught

• History in Public (undergraduate seminar, graduate colloquium)
• From Pueblos to Strip Malls: A History of the American Landscape (undergraduate seminar)
• Space and Place in History (graduate colloquium)
• U.S. History from 1865 to the Present (undergraduate lecture)
• The City in American Culture (undergraduate lecture)

Publication Highlights

Books

[Edited and introduced] St. Louis in the Century of Henry Shaw: A View Beyond the Garden Wall. Columbia, MO: The University of Missouri Press, 2003.

St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001.

[With David Harris] Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco. Montréal, CN: Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.

[With David Gebhard and Robert Winter] The Guide to Architecture in San Francisco and Northern California. Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith, 1985.

[In progress] The Day in Its Color: Across America with Charles Cushman, a book about the life and work of an amateur photographer whose 14,000 color images shed new light on the everyday American landscape from the 1930s through the 1960s.