News Release

Robin Veder to present as part of Princeton lecture series

April 7, 2008

Penn State Harrisburg Assistant Professor of Humanities and Art History/Visual Culture Robin Veder will deliver an invited lecture April 14 at Princeton University as part of its spring Architecture and Urbanism Lecture Series on the theme of “Gardening.”

The series is arranged by the Princeton Center for Architecture, Urbanism + Infrastructure.

Dr. Veder will discuss “Pastoral or Urbane? Working Men and Flower Gardening in Industrial Britain.” Her talks will center on the cultural meanings assigned to ornamental gardening activities and the characteristics and values ascribed to those who garden.

She explains, “A fundamental conflict that emerges from this is the representation of gardening as pacifying leisure or idealized labor versus the skilled work and engagement with capitalism that the gardener experienced.”

Dr. Veder’s research includes the recently published article, “Mother-Love for Plant-Children Sentimental Pastoralism and Nineteenth-Century Parlor Gardening,” and the forthcoming essay “Pestalozzi and the Picturebook: Visual Pedagogy in The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, which is based on material exhibited at Penn State Harrisburg in the spring 2007 exhibit “Brian Selznick: Art of the Picturebook.”

Before coming to Penn State, she curated a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition entitled “Exploring Garden Transformations, 1900-2000” which focused on aesthetic, organic, functional, and economic transformations in five American estate gardens.