Monday, March 1, 2010
12:00 noon - 1:00 p.m.

SLIS Library
4191 Helen C. White Hall
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Julia’s dissertation, "Making Metropolitans: Urban Culture and Print Community in U.S. Newspapers, 1880-1930," looks at daily newspapers' role in shaping U.S. cities. She studied cultural history as an undergraduate at Cornell, and spent time teaching English in South Korea and working for StoryCorps, an oral history project, before entering graduate school.

In the late nineteenth century, syndicates began to sell features to metropolitan newspapers across the country. This mass-distribution method kept prices low, so smaller papers were able to buy more elaborate and diverse features than they could generate on their own. In Milwaukee, the syndicated features likely broadened readers' horizons and offered them a new level of connection to a culture beyond their own region. But this kind of content also edged out locally-written articles in newspapers, homogenizing regional journalism and regional culture. Julia will examine the gains and the losses that came with the new syndicate system, and evaluate its impact on both the Milwaukee newspaper industry and on readers' daily lives.