Biographical Summary

Jonathan Dentler joined the GHI as a Visiting Fellow in September 2023. He arrived from Paris, where he was a Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2022) and a postdoctoral researcher associated with the “Early Conflict Photography and Visual AI” (EyCon) project (2022-2023). In 2020, he received a Ph.D. in History from the University of Southern California, where he also earned a graduate certificate in Visual Studies. He is at work on a book project based on his dissertation that considers the global development of wire photography services between 1917 and 1955. By excavating wire photography services’ institutional histories and examining how intellectuals and the public saw telecommunicated photographs as both engines and symptoms of global culture, the book shows how this technology produced and reshaped global space. A second project currently in progress explores how nineteenth and twentieth century artists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and writers imagined the lost continent of Atlantis as a prehistoric cradle of civilization, helping to make sense of deepening transoceanic connections in their own time.