Our twenty-eighth Standing-Room Only Lecture will have Morgan Forde walking down the street from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard to look behind the curtain. In 1929, the USSR formed a company called Intourist tasked with courting foreign tourism to showcase the Soviet experiment. Soon after, the company launched Soviet Travel, an illustrated monthly magazine which brought the novelty and cultural diversity of the USSR to the masses. The magazine proved particularly attractive to women, with its frequent coverage of female engineers, artisans, and teachers, and they were quickly among Intourist’s first guests. This talk features five American women who were not purely “Intourists” but became key figures in the production of widely circulated photographs, articles, and books about Soviet life for American audiences in the 1930s: Florence H. Luscomb, Anna Louise Strong, Dorothy Wallace, Dorothy West, and Margaret Bourke-White.
Our speaker, Morgan Forde, is a PhD student at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where her work focuses on the intersections of twentieth-century US urban planning history and the socio-spatial activism of radical Black Power, socialist, and feminist movements. She has been a freelance journalist and editor for several years, and her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Mic, The Nation, Ploughshares, and Popular Mechanics.
Thirty tickets are available for $10 each.
Date and Time
Thursday, March 21 at 7p
Doors open at 6p for mingling.
Standing-Room Only Lectures aim to present short talks about graphic design, typography, and collecting. The lectures are kept to about twenty minutes because—true to its name—the series takes place in our standing-room only gallery. So, wear comfortable shoes and bring a short attention span.