Why does the Addams family live in a decayed Victorian house? Why does the ominous mansion in Psycho have a mansard roof? Sarah Burns, one of the today’s foremost art historians, examines the sinister side of American architecture, tracing the affinity for ghouls and ghosts in Victorian houses through the painting, photography, and mass media of the early 20th century.

Dr. Burns, Ruth N. Halls Professor Emerita, Department of the History of Art, Indiana University, will speak on her research in a lecture
titled “Better for Haunts: Victorian Houses and the Modern Imagination.”

Her many publications include the now-classic “Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America” and, more recently, “Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America.”

Dr. Burns’s is lecture is a joint program between the Sheldon Museum of Art and the Department of Art and Art History, Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts with additional support from UNL’s Nineteenth-Century Studies Program.