News > May 1, 2008

By Katie Phillips | Staff writer

Sarah Watts, professor of history at the university, received a 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for her research in fine arts. The Foundation was established in 1925 by Senator Simon Guggenheim and his wife.

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History professor Sarah Watts received a 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for her fine arts research. (Photo courtesy of Julian Burroughs)

It was created as a memorial for their son who died April 26, 1922 and since then the foundation has granted more than $265 million in fellowships to over 16,500 individuals. With over 2,600 applicants only 190 scholars, scientists and artists were selected from the United States and Canada. “Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for hopeful and continued accomplishment,” according to a university press release earlier this week.

Watts has been a university faculty member since 1987. She received a bachelor’s degree in history from Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts, a master’s degree in German history from the University of Oklahoma and a doctorate in United States history from the University of Oklahoma.

Watts is currently working on a book manuscript based on the research she has collected, titled “Figuring the Empire: Lyonel Feininger’s Lustige Blätter Years.”

The collection includes 257 previously unstudied satirical political cartoons that were written by German Expressionist Lyonel Feininger between 1897 and 1910.

Watts says that through her research she hopes to “reorient scholarship on Feininger, as well as establish views about the development of satirical humor, literature and art in Germany.”

She found a rare book collection that held a series of Feininger’s political cartoons in an East Berlin Branch of the Berlin State Library.

Feininger’s cartoons were commonly published in the Lustige Blätter, one of the more famous and widely read magazines in Germany. Watts was one of the first scholars to run across this material because access has been difficult since World War II. Watts believes that Feininger is an important figure in art history and has yet to be a main concern in all but one renowned art history text book. Sixty-seven of the 257 political cartoons by Feininger were on the cover of the Lustige Blätter.

“Lyonel Feininger figures prominently among German expressionists, yet his career as one of Germany’s most prominent political satirists has been overlooked, leaving him a sleeping giant in the cultural history of Bismarck’s Reich,” Watts said. “My study of Feininger’s cartoons will present for the first time works that have never been seen together or collected in one place. It will analyze Feininger’s satires within their milieu, delineating the possibilities and limits of political protest in Imperial Germany at a time when mass media was superseding art as a primary vehicle of visual culture.”

Watts is the author of two books: Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire and Order Against Chaos: Business culture and Labor Ideology in America, 1880-1920.