Emerging Scholars: Cliff Dwellers’ Portrayals and Furniture on the Move

The Victorian Society New York’s 2025 Emerging Scholars winners will shed light on little-known yet influential aspects of Gilded Age history, literature, international trade, and design.

Sarah Egan, a graduate student at the Bard Graduate Center, will discuss Illinois education advocate Clara Kern Bayliss (1848-1948), who authored early 1900s children’s books about Lolami, a fictional "Little Cliff Dweller" in Arizona. In the books, Lolami becomes orphaned, explores abandoned cliff settlements, and then becomes ingratiated with another local indigenous group, the Hopi. Egan will look at Bayliss’s archaeological and historical sources, including displays at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and the books’ classroom uses that shaped children’s thinking about American history and Americanness and reflected and transmitted harmful and reductive racial and social hierarchies.

Steven Baltsas, a graduate student in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, University of Delaware, will explore how, in the mid-19th century, Alexander Roux and his brother Frédéric organized a transnational furniture enterprise between New York and Paris. The brothers catered to cosmopolitan customers via networks of manufactories, retailers, and display rooms.

Images: Detail of head on rosewood library table carved by worker for Alexander Roux, ca. 1858–60, New York. Heidelberg Hall Collection, PA.

“Cliff Dwellers at 1893 World's Fair, The Columbian Exposition, Chicago.” Photograph in Glimpses of the World's Fair: A Selection of Gems of the White City Seen Through a Camera. Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1893. Northern Illinois University, courtesy Sarah Egan.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Center at West Park, 165 West 86th Street, New York, United States