research overview
- David Ciarlo specializes in the social and cultural history of modern Germany, the history of European imperialism and racism, and the history of visual culture and mass culture in European and global contexts. His first book, 'Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany' (Harvard University Press, 2011) uses visual archives to trace the interconnected histories of commercial culture and colonial culture in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ciarlo's new research project explores the intersection of consumer culture and propaganda in Germany during the First World War; this research project explores the link between commerce and the development of visual propaganda techniques in the First World War, and the way in which this intersection of advertising and propaganda propagated imagery of militarized, hardened masculinity, with implications for the formation of a fascist aesthetic.
