Guest Lecture Volker Depkat (University of Regensburg)

“Political Cartoons and the Visual Culture of the American Presidency in Antebellum America”

The visual culture of the American presidency in the Early Republic so far has largely focused on 'official' portraits that represented the U.S. presidents as guardians of the U.S. constitution and republican heads of state. The presidential representations in the form of oil paintings showed the U.S. presidents as they wanted to be seen. Competing visual narratives of the American presidency and American political culture can be found in the rich wealth of political cartoons in antebellum America, which tend to deconstruct the serenity and gravitas of the presidency as visualized in the state portraiture of a Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, or Ralph E.W. Earl. Drawing on a selection of political cartoons from the 1820s, 30s and 40s, Volker Depkat’s talk will look at the visual grammar of political caricature and how it relates to emerging official visual culture of the American presidency in antebellum America.

Volker Depkat is a trained historian and professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg. In his work he focuses on the history of the United States from the colonial period to today in national, continental and European-American perspective. He has also done major work on the theory and practice of biography and autobiography, and he is interested in the visual dimensions of U.S. political culture. His most recent publication is American Exceptionalism (Rowman&Littlefield 2021).

Poster