Julie Park is a scholar of eighteenth-century England.
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Centuries before photography, the camera obscura transformed ordinary rooms into magical spaces, casting the outside world inside and revealing how light, shadow, and perspective shaped early modern visions of reality.
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Julie Park is the Paterno Family Librarian for Literature and professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. Her most recent book, the award-winning My Dark Room: Spaces of the Inner Self in Eighteenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press, 2023), posits the camera obscura as a paradigm for how interior spaces were designed, inhabited, and inscribed by eighteenth-century English writers as realms of emotion and the imagination.
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Eighteenth-Century Pocket Diaries as Containers of Life
Inscription
First emerging in the eighteenth century, pocket diaries were designed to contain details about its ownerʼs life. Writing in pocket diaries was something that happened as life was being lived.
Graphic Literacy and Design in Eighteenth-Century Commonplace Books
Eighteenth-Century Life | January | 2024
This article gives a new meaning to “life writing” by including the tools used for keeping records in 18th-century commonplace books. These books were used to organize thoughts and information as life happened, especially through the use of grids and lines in indexes. These lines helped separate different topics and required people to be able to read and understand symbols, not just words.
Park argues that the idea of hand-written manuscripts should encompass visual tools used to organize ideas. It focuses on a system created by John Locke, explained in his book A New Method of Making Common-Place Books. The article also looks at real examples of commonplace books from the 1700s to show how people used these systems in everyday life. Overall, it expands our idea of what counts as writing and how people recorded their lives.
Optical Fictions of the Eighteenth-Century Zograscope
Word and Image | December | 2021
Between the publication of Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), a device known as the zograscope first appeared. This device allowed its users to see the world in three dimensions and in color from the comfort of home or in crowded venues. An understanding of psychological perspective as it was developed in eighteenth-century novels, and optical perspective as it was created by the zograscope, are incomplete without relating them to each other. Both are forms of narrative perspective, and demonstrate how text and image, and their materialities, came to interpenetrate each other in modern conceptions of point of view.
Publications by this author
Spaces of the Inner Self in Eighteenth-Century England
University of Chicago Press | August | 2023
Julie Park explores places of solitude and enclosure that gave eighteenth-century subjects closer access to their inner worlds: grottos, writing closets, landscape follies, and the camera obscura, that beguiling “dark room” inside which the outside world in all its motion and color is projected.
Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England
Stanford University Press | October | 2009
Objects we traditionally regard as poor imitations of the human—dolls, automata, puppets—proliferated in eighteenth-century Englandʼs rapidly expanding market culture. During the same period, the novel emerged as a popular literary genre, turning the experience of life into a narrated object of psychological plausibility.
Park argues that the material objects abounding in the consumer markets of eighteenth-century England worked in conjunction with the novel, itself a commodity fetish, as vital tools for fashioning the modern self.
Media by this author
Interview | March | 2024
Julie Park discusses her book My Dark Room, which explores how certain spaces—like grottos, writing closets, garden buildings, and the camera obscura—helped people in the eighteenth century connect with their inner thoughts. These quiet, enclosed spaces were ideal for people to focus on their emotions and imagination. The camera obscura, a dark room that projects images of the outside world, became a powerful symbol for how people experienced their inner lives during this time.
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