1. Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, 1850-1930, Marsha Morton, lead editor, and Barbara Larson, ed., London: Bloomsbury Press, 2021. Morton authored the Introduction (pp. 1-24) and Chapter 5, “Leopold Carl Müller’s Scenes from Egyptian Life: Ethnography, Race, and Orientalism in Habsburg Vienna” (pp. 107-148.)* Paperback edition March 2023
This anthology investigates the visual imagery of race construction in Scandinavia, Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Russia. Beginning in 1850 and extending into the early 21st century, our book explores how paintings, photographs, prints, and other artistic media formulated visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures in countries associated with theorizations of white identity during the rise of the disciplines of ethnography and anthropology. Essays represent the voices of those who produced images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued ethnographic and anthropological information. In documenting the colonial-style treatment of minority groups and destabilizing the binaries of racial classification through the perspectives of the arts, this book establishes the fabricated nature of ethnic identity and challenges the certainties of racial categorization.
2. Marsha Morton, Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture: On the Threshold of German Modernism, Farnham Surrey: Ashgate Press, 2014, paperback 2018, 450 pages.
The Wilhelmine Empire’s opening decades (1870s – 1880s) were crucial transitional years in the development of German modernism, both politically and culturally. I argue that no artist represented the shift from tradition to unsettling innovation more compellingly than Max Klinger. His early prints and drawings are studied within the context of intellectual and material transformations in Wilhelmine society through an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses Darwinism, ethnography, dreams and hypnosis, the literary Romantic grotesque, criminology, and the urban experience. His work, in advance of Expressionism, revealed the psychological and biological underpinnings of modern rational man whose drives and passions undermined bourgeois constructions of material progress, social stability, and class status at a time when Germans were engaged in defining themselves following unification in 1871. This book is the first full-length study of Klinger in English.