Poe, Prints, and Intellectual Property
Andrei Pop is Associate Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Before that, he studied at Stanford (BA) and Harvard (PhD) and taught at the University of Vienna and the University of Basel. His first book, Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli (Oxford, 2015), considered the Enlightenment tendency to view ancient art as culturally distinct from modern Europe’s and featured a large cast of characters, including Emma Hamilton, Erasmus Darwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. A translation of Karl Rosenkranz’s 1853 Aesthetics of Ugliness and an edited volume on the subject, both with Mechtild Widrich, address the continued relevance of aesthetic categories, particularly negative ones. Pop’s second monograph, A Forest of Symbols (Zone, 2019), investigates the ways in which poets, visual artists, philosophers, and mathematicians around 1900 turned their attention to the very means of symbol-making in various efforts to overcome the privacy of meaning. His longer-term interests include the imagination of the future, 19th-century mathematician-philosopher-priest Bernard Bolzano, and the collaboration between the 18th-century caricaturist James Gillray and his publisher Hannah Humphrey.