APRIL MASTEN
Associate Professor (Rutgers University, 1999)
Curriculum vitae
Office: SBS S-313
Email: april.masten@stonybrook.edu
Interests: Nineteenth-century U.S. social and cultural history
I am a Professor of American History at Stony Brook University, where I teach graduate and undergraduate courses on the Early Republic, antebellum, and Civil War eras, industrialization, slavery, women’s work, and popular culture. I have also developed a unique research seminar called Dancing Through American History in which students learn to waltz, ring shout, lindy hop, jig, and salsa to complement their archival study of the people, places, and periods that produced these dances.
As a scholar, I consider myself a labor historian of the arts, especially painting and print-making, dancing, and music. I believe every art form acquires its meaning and value from the conditions of its production and reception. Critical recognition and financial success depend not just on an artist’s individual talent or genius, but on the prevailing social, economic, political, and cultural structures of opportunity. I study those structures, both institutional and ideological, over time, and try to recover the experiences of the remarkable though often obscure men, women, and children who aspired to develop their creative abilities, express their deepest selves, and earn their livings doing so.
My first book, Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York (Penn Press, 2008), explores the surprisingly egalitarian cultural landscape of the 1850s and 1860s in which thousands of young women, aided by the Ruskinian “Unity of Art” ideal and radical artisan reformers and philanthropists, managed to study the visual arts at New York’s Cooper Union and become professional artists, albeit in an emerging industrial society that extolled masculine genius and exploited women’s labor in all realms.
My forthcoming book, Diamond and Juba, The Raucous World of 19th-Century Challenge Dancing (University of Illinois Press, Fall 2025), recovers the careers of two celebrated jig dancers, Irish American John Diamond and African American William Henry Lane (aka Juba), as they competed for high stakes and championship belts in the taverns, circuses, and theaters of antebellum America. Their extraordinary stage rivalry unfolded amid a rising tide of nativism and negrophobia that drove them closer even as it divided the nation. Out of this cauldron came the creation of a “purely American” dance that continues to flourish, adapt, and inspire young people around the world.
I have also published essays on the life and work of genre painter Lilly Martin Spencer, the overlooked artistic contributions of artists’ models, the pitfalls of researching under-documented lives and writing interdisciplinary history, and the joys of teaching history through dance. My essay “Shake Hands? Lilly Martin Spencer and the Politics of Art” (American Quarterly, June 2004) won the 2005 Article Prize from the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.
My research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, Houghton Library at Harvard, Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton, and the National Humanities Center. I hold a PhD in American History from Rutgers University, an MA in the Social History of Art from the University of Leeds, and a BA in Music and Dance from San Francisco State University. I live in Setauket, New York, with my partner in time, historian Vincent DiGirolamo, teach dance classes to adults, and keep close ties to my hometown of Carmel, California.
Winner of the American Historical Association's 2021 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award
Winner of the 2021-2022 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching
Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008 (Series: The Arts and Intellectual Life in
Modern
America) https://www.pennpress.org/9780812240719/art-work/
"Dance Herstories: Three Inspiring Women Share How They Are Using History to Expand the Dance Education Landscape," DanceTeacher, March 22, 2022.