Emerging Scholars:

Gilded Age Escalators, Windows, and Women on the Rise

The Center at West Park

165 West 86th Street

New York, NY 10024

Tickets Here!!

The Victorian Society New York’s 2024 Emerging Scholars winners will shed light on little-known yet influential aspects of Gilded Age culture, activism, and architecture. Sophia Kamps, recent graduate of Queen’s University in Ontario, will report on surveying 1,200 Gilded Age stained-glass windows at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Diane Dias De Fazio, a graduate student at Kent State University, will lecture on how the forgotten c. 1900 inventors of the ubiquitous, oft-unheralded escalator changed the way people experienced and used department stores and other public spaces. Deena Ecker, a student at the CUNY Graduate Center, will look at late Victorian streetscapes and culture (popular, consumer, and sexual) through the lens of prostitution. How did these maligned women maintain some agency? Amanda Westbrook Brennan, a CUNY Graduate Center student, will analyze Black women activists, writers, and club women who elevated communities while defying stereotypes.

📷 “Inclined Elevator” at Coney Island, Street Railway Review, 1896.

📷 Gordon Ross, “The Dance of Death,” Puck, v. 71, no. 1822 (1912 January 31), centerfold. 1912. N.Y.: Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

📷 C.M. Bell, Mrs. A.J. Cooper, 1901. Photograph from a glass plate negative. Library of Congress, C.M. Bell Studio Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.

📷 Elizabeth Hunter. Sophia Kamps with a Mausoleum’s Religious Window, 2023.