American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
Art historian Michael Leja excavates the nineteenth-century foundations of our contemporary picture-saturated world. Drawing on his recent book, A Flood of Pictures: The Formation of a Picture Culture in the United States (2025) Leja reveals insights into several questions: When and how did pictures begin to permeate everyday lives in the United States? What happened to those daily lives when they did? And what happened to pictures in the process? He takes us back to the formative period for this cultural transformation: three decades before the Civil War, when the ordinary experiences of a large segment of the population came to include pictures of many kinds, including illustrations in books, pamphlets, and newspapers; photographs on cards; full-sheet printed pictures collected in scrapbooks or albums or hung on walls; posters and broadsheets; spectacular paintings displayed in theatrical venues; and more.
Michael Leja is James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor Emeritus of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. During 2025-26 he is in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as the Lauder Distinguished Scholar at the Met’s Leonard A. Lauder Center for the Study of Modern Art.
Leja studies the visual arts in various media (painting, sculpture, film, photography, prints, illustrations) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, primarily in the United States. His work is multidisciplinary and strives to understand visual artifacts in relation to contemporary cultural, social, political, and intellectual developments. He is especially interested in examining the interactions between works of art and particular audiences.
His most recent book, A Flood of Pictures: The Formation of a Picture Culture in the United States (2025), reconstructs the era in which mass-produced pictures in many media began to permeate Americans’ everyday lives. He was elected to AAS membership in November 2020.