Guest Lecture James Kimble (Seton Hall University)

Photo: Prof. James Kimble, Ph.D.

30.05.2022
11:45 - 13:15
Department of American Studies
[0034K10040] Hörsaal HS 34.K1, Attemsgasse 25, 1.Kellergeschoß

“Rosie the Riveter as Icon, Inspiration, and Everywoman

One of the most contested visual symbols underpinning American culture is also among its most familiar. Rosie the Riveter, born in a 1942 song title, rose to become a wartime staple in posters, newspaper ads, and moving images on the U.S. home front—before facing an inevitable decline with the approach of victory. Yet her reemergence in the 1980s as the de facto image of feminism affirmed her iconic status for multiple stakeholders. In this lecture, James J. Kimble investigates the complex symbolism underlying Rosie, from her wartime impact to her contested legacy. Ultimately, he concludes, she is a representative icon whose influence as both heroine and everywoman shows no signs of waning.

James J. Kimble (PhD, University of Maryland) is Professor of Communication & the Arts at Seton Hall University (New Jersey, USA). He studies domestic propaganda, war rhetoric, and visual imagery. His research on the World War II era has reached a worldwide media audience of over 1.2 billion people in more than a dozen languages, and he is the founding editor of the academic journal Home Front Studies.
Professor Kimble served as guest curator and catalogue editor for the Norman Rockwell Museum’s major international exhibition Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms; hundreds of thousands of visitors visited the show, including eighty members of Congress.
Named a Distinguished Honor Graduate of the US Army’s Chaplain Center and School, Kimble has also served as a Fulbright Scholar in Croatia and has been a Senior Fellow at the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies.
He is the author of Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds and Domestic Propaganda (2006) and Prairie Forge: The Extraordinary Story of the Nebraska Scrap Metal Drive of World War II (2014), as well as the writer and co-producer of the movie documentary Scrappers: How the Heartland Won World War II. His most recent book, co-edited with Trischa Goodnow, is called The 10¢ War: Comic Books, Propaganda, and World War II (2016).

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