Before 2018 the Posner Internship invited CMU students to conduct research with the Posner Memorial Collection. Each internship culminated in an exhibition installed in the Posner Center that illustrated the intern’s project. Archived here are short descriptions of past exhibitions curated by interns from 2004 until 2018, when the internship program was revised to entail a broader scope of work in Special Collections. Read about the current Posner Curatorial Internship and the application process here.
The Posner Curatorial Internship is generously funded by the Posner Fine Arts Foundation. Both the Posner Memorial Collection and the Posner Curatorial Internship are named in honor of Pittsburgh entrepreneur and philanthropist Henry Posner, Sr., who formed the Posner Memorial Collection.
Commemorating the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, this exhibit demonstrated the continuing relevance of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster to contemporary audiences by relating rare university holdings like the 1818 first edition of the text, and documents in the history of science from pioneering figures such as Luigi Galvani to CMU's ongoing areas of scientific research, including brain-computer interfaces, robotics, climate and energy decision making and artificial intelligence. Examining these areas of contemporary research in light of the novel's much wider cultural legacy, the exhibit located them within a wider nexus or complex of ideas about the mind, the body, ideas of nature, ethical dilemmas, revolutions, and creators of all kinds. Ultimately, the goal of the exhibit was to encourage visitors to better understand how Frankenstein plays an important role in shaping our perceptions of the dangers of technological innovations run amok, but also how we continue to think about ourselves as humans.
This exhibit explored Peking Opera, an esoteric art form that is not familiar to westerners. Mr. and Mrs. Posner were among the very first westerners to explore Peking Opera. Their interest in eastern cultures frequently brought them to China and Japan to collect books on culture and pattern design. They brought a collection of books on Peking Opera to America, which now reside in the Carnegie Mellon University libraries. The topics of the books, some Chinese and some produced by western scholars, range from costume design and classic literature to biographies of famous Peking Opera actors.
This exhibit investigated how caricatures of sailors reflected 18th- and 19th-century British concerns about Britain’s place in the world. The common British sailor, popularly known as the Jolly Jack Tar, developed as a distinct and recognizable figure in the 18th century, often seen as disrupting society. Representations of Jack Tar also reveal many facets of British masculinity, including drunkenness, bravery, sexuality, and patriotism.
Books and illustrations from both the Posner Collection and Special Collections illustrate a sailor’s life and highlight how characterizations of Tar remained consistent over time, influencing how people today think about veterans.
Read the CMU News story: Three-Minute Thesis Exhibition in Posner Center
This exhibit considered the strategies shared by the arts, humanities, and sciences for visualizing invisible things in order to better understand them. Reaching back to Galileo’s sunspot engravings from the early seventeenth century, and forward to the aesthetic choices of scientists rendering images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the exhibit showcases visualizations in print, pixel and paint by great minds of the last five hundred years.
Ivan Sutherland’s Trojan Cockroach told the story of computer graphics, walking machines, and the origins of the technology underlying modern advances in robots. The protagonist of the exhibit, Ivan Sutherland, is often considered the father of computer graphics. An alum of Carnegie Tech in the 1950’s, Sutherland went on to develop one of the first human computer interfaces for graphics at MIT.
In the 1980’s, Sutherland returned to CMU and worked with a group of graduate students to create “The Trojan Cockroach”, a six legged hexapod walking machine, considered to be the first man-carrying computer-controlled walking machine.
Featuring artifacts from the original robot, a history of Sutherland’s work, rare and hard to find images of walking robots, as well as previously unseen video footage and a virtual reality simulation, this exhibition showcased the history of Ivan’s work as well as the role walking machines have in the development of the field of robotics.
We often think of writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman as the fathers of American literature, but we largely ignore Washington Irving. In the early days of our nation, at a time when European writers dominated the literary scene, Irving offered critically and financially successful counterpoints in works like The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819-1820), which included his most popular and long-lasting stories: “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Indeed, Irving’s influence on American literary culture was immense. Besides creating a prototype of American literature that others would build upon, including writers he actively encouraged like Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, he lobbied hard for more stringent international copyright laws to protect American writers. His influence on American folk and popular culture became perhaps his most enduring legacy. The folk tales and histories he created in works like The Sketchbook and A History of New-York shaped the national narratives, symbols, and myths Americans have accepted and adopted to their own times.
Reticulated, net-like structures inform the language we use and the objects we make. This exhibition examines the success and failure of reticulated structures, their birth and death.
Descriptions such as "tree-like" and "building block" help us understand complicated, interlinked phenomena, but they can also be limiting. By understanding how instances of reticulation create order from chaos we can better understand possible new avenues for their use in both the creation of new technologies and ideas.
This exhibit explored self-made ritual in adolescence, marriage, and death rites to address how rituals adapt to different situations and individuals. The curator, Nicole Anderson, was a junior in the Bachelor of Humanities and Arts program, with concentrations in Art and History.
Karl Marx’s critique of the industrial revolution - Das Kapital (1867) - has secured its place as one of the most important and contentious theoretical works in modern intellectual history. Just four years after the book’s original German publication, supporters formed a Marxist Party, though few would have read his magnum opus. What’s more, this trend has persisted for the nearly one hundred and fifty years since the three-volume work’s publication. Accordingly, this exhibit explores the actual transmission of Marx’s ideas via pamphlets, excerpts, reading guides, adaptations, journalism and cheap reprints including his most widely read work, “The Communist Manifesto.
This exhibit explored the Victorian era’s interest in English manor and country houses as a destination for tourists, as spaces for cultivating a national history, and objects for debates about preservation and restoration. This project explored the importance of domestic spaces to public identity and asked how a culture narrates its buildings as objects of particular cultural value worth preserving. Central to the exhibit is S. C. Hall’s two-volume illustrated text, The baronial halls: ancient and picturesque edifices of England, which serves as a focal point for the questions the exhibit explored.
This exhibit featured images that illustrate scientific bodies: human, celestial, and microscopic. The project questioned the relationships between seeing and knowing, wonder and curiosity, and audience experiences over time as they confront incredible images across a range of media. Highlights of the exhibit were Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Johannes Hevelius's Selenographia and Robert Hooke's Micrographia.
Failed as a playwright, and a mediocre legal scholar, Walter Scott was yet determined to succeed. In 1802, he convinced a publisher to publish The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Growing from a planned “slim volume, “ the final book was a three-volume set, containing traditional Scottish folk ballads, war epics, romantic sagas, and new works emulating the diction of Scottish folk balladry. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border was a hit, and earned Scott wealth and prestige. This exhibit explores the early nineteenth century literary network and Scott’s rise to unprecedented, international literary fame.
This exhibit explained that despite local topography and a complex planning environment, commuter cycling is becoming viable in Pittsburgh as cyclists are supported by a committed network of local planners and advocates.
Most of the color that permeates our lives is reproduced. Pigments, dyes and light have been manipulated to create color on originally colorless surfaces. A more thorough technology allows more precise color identification, color order systems developed along with color reproduction technologies. This exhibit explored the basic principles, and the practical nature of several color reproduction technologies.
This exhibit showcased an illustrated edition of Henry M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa: or, The Quest, Rescue and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria (1890) and reflected on the conflicted history of Western imperialism in Africa. The exhibit looked at Stanley’s role within the fin de siècle Scramble for Africa (1880-1920). Was it a story of heroism and adventure as told in the European media, or the evidence of horrible brutality in imperial Africa?
This exhibit asked people to consider books as artifacts of history and to use the book’s intrinsic qualities as clues to the historic, cultural, and artistic context from which it sprung.
The contributions of patrons of arts and science have made a difference in history. Patronage still makes a significant impact through grants, sponsorships, scholarships and more. The exhibit tracked the relationships of authors represented in the Posner Memorial Collection with their patrons and showed diverse types of patronage.
This exhibit documented the p4 audio project of recordings of great literature uploaded to YouTube. p4 featured Carnegie Mellon student performers reading 15 of William Shakespeare’s sonnets and some of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The exhibit illustrated Goodman's sources and documented the creative process.
Representations of Elizabeth Tudor were used by her supporters to enhance her image as a worthy female ruler and a force to be reckoned with in England and abroad. As shown in this exhibit, the images evolved through various stages of her life and reign, and were crafted and explicated in the visual and literary arts of her time.
H.G. Well's The Time Machine (1895) was used as a case study to examine the influence of 19th century science on science fiction’s development. The exhibit featured books by Darwin, Pasteur, Maxwell, Einstein and others. Considering the themes of familiar versus strange; control of nature; and the importance of the scientific method, Wells’ commentary on science and society remains applicable today.
Critics and viewers alike thought that Mira Nair’s 2004 film Vanity Fair was not faithful enough to William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel. Adaptation is not a direct translation of material, but rather a reshaping that retains a number of qualities from the original work. This exhibit considered the merits of Nair's Vanity Fair as a work of art in its own right, reflecting a literary source.
The mathematical theory of probability emerged abruptly during the Enlightenment period/ movement. With a review of treatises from Huygens, Bernouilli, Montmort, and De Moivre, this exhibit displayed texts that represent different probability concepts bound together by a unified mathematical theory.
On the Origin of Species was published in November 1859 and, with this book, Darwin’s name became synonymous with his theory of evolution. The Darwinian model of evolution gained credibility as genetic principals were discovered. However, the theory still faces opposition, and remains a heated topic of public debate.
This exhibit juxtaposed selected tales from the Arabian Nights, where women are the heroes of the story, with art created by women Carnegie Mellon art students. The contemporary painting, sculpture and textiles interpreted the themes of creativity, independence, and cunningness found in the tales – while drawing attention to women's diverse roles in Islamic cultures.
The exhibit examined the historical precedents and modern-day applications of Kepler's ideas in Harmonices Mundi (Harmony of the World, 1619), which discusses the integral role of music in celestial movement, using geometry, astronomy and astrology. The exhibit showcased original editions by Euclid, Ptolemy, and Shakespeare, along with jazz great John Coltrane and composer Paul Hindemith.
