Participant Info
- First Name
- McKayla
- Last Name
- Sluga
- Country
- United States
- State
- MI Michigan
- slugamck@msu.edu
- Affiliation
- Michigan State University
- Website URL
- https://history.msu.edu/people/graduate-students/mckayla-sluga/
- Keywords
- America, US, Europe, Cultural History, Intellectual History, Radicalism, Film, Art, Education, Politics, Modernism, Soviet, Avant-Garde, Labor, Masses, New York City, Collectives
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- other credentials
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I am a PhD Candidate in History at Michigan State University. My research investigates the evolution of art and film education outside professionalized programs. Independent, amateur, and activist cultural brokers developed schools, distribution networks, exhibitions, journals, publishers, and study spaces across NYC in the 1910s-40s. These collectives were instrumental in shaping Americans’ tastes and institutions for modern art and film in the early 20th century. My dissertation centers how leftists and progressives in New York City worked in proximity to create educational spaces for modern art and film in America. This often involved engaging with European and Soviet institutions and revealed how aesthetic, political, educational, and business concerns among brokers intersected and sometimes conflicted. Much of this relied on self-documentation and constructing their own institutions as sites of learning.
I’ve taught several courses at MSU, ranging from American History surveys to History of the Holocaust to Latin America and the World. Recently, I’ve been teaching interdisciplinary courses in the Social Science Scholars Program and am a Residential College of Arts and Humanities Senior Fellow for the Scholarship on Teaching and Learning.
- Recent Publications
“Dreams of Freedom and a Life that Matters: How the Black Lives Matter Movements is Reimagining America,” Skin Deep: Contemporary Engagements with American Memory, Race, and Contested Spaces. 2017.
“The Emergence of Scientific, Aesthetic Racism in Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime,” History Matters: An Undergraduate Journal of Historical Research. Spring 2017: 99-123.
“Music and Race,” Elmira in the Gilded Age. Chemung Historical Society. 2014.
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- Country Focus
- United States
- Expertise by Geography
- Russia, United States, Western Europe
- Expertise by Chronology
- 20th century
- Expertise by Topic
- Art & Architectural History, Literary History, Politics, Rebellion & Revolution
