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When art historian and Stanford University Professor Wanda M. Corn RI ’04 arrived at the Radcliffe Institute to start her fellowship year in the fall of 2003, she hit the ground running. An expert on American modernism, she had multiple projects on tap, including doing the groundwork research for a future museum exhibition and catalog on “Gertrude Stein and the Making of the Modern.” Exploring Stein’s influence on American artists and on modern portraiture, the project will be completed in 2007-2008.

But that was just one of her tasks for the year. Corn also brought with her four large boxes stuffed with almost twenty years of research materials she is turning into a book about painter Mary Cassatt and the decorative program of murals and sculptures commissioned for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Long intrigued by issues of gender and the relationship between popular and fine arts, Corn wanted to tell the story of the women artists who contributed murals, sculptures, and stained glass works to the décor of the Woman’s Building, the largest world’s fair structure ever administered by and dedicated to the achievements of women in every field of the arts and sciences. All aspects of the building were dedicated to women’s contributions to contemporary life. Even the building was designed by a woman architect.

“While there had been other woman’s buildings, this is the one that was most substantial, the largest and most widely celebrated internationally,” says Corn. “But no one has written about the more than a dozen women who were involved in decorating the building—not the women who showed their paintings and sculptures inside the exhibition hall of the building—but the women painters and sculptors who created the architectural decorations. Since no women were commissioned to create the major decorations in the fair’s other buildings, the Woman’s Building offered female artists their first opportunity to do the same kinds of large public commissions male artists were doing. What always caught my eye about this project is that women united, by and large, to make this project as good and as big and as grand as they could.”

With boxes brimming over with guidebooks to the fair, newspaper clippings, photographs, letters, and ephemera, Corn needed help making sense of it all.

“I’d been working on this project well over a decade, mostly giving lectures and collecting materials as I went,” says Corn. “I’d been stuffing things in these files for years. It was very disorganized.”

Encouraged by other fellows to seek the assistance of a Harvard undergraduate through the Radcliffe Research Partnership program, Corn set about interviewing students. But after meeting five candidates, she still hadn’t found a good match for the Woman’s Building project—that is, until she met Claire Pasternack.

Then a junior, Pasternack ’05, was a self-described “totally overcommitted undergraduate” involved in theatre and teaching in the local schools when her art history professor told her about an opportunity to work with Corn. Despite her busy schedule, Pasternack jumped at the chance. A history and literature concentrator, she not only had some knowledge of the 1893 World’s Fair, she’d already written a couple of papers about it.

“I had been obsessed with world expositions since my freshman year, when I took a seminar on American mass culture and its effects on literature,” says Pasternack. “At the end of my sophomore year, I had done a paper on a memoir about two boys who go to the Chicago fair and look at all the exhibitions, including the Woman’s Building.”

Corn couldn’t have asked for a better research assistant. “She just seemed perfect. Intellectually, she had all this background and could step right in,” Corn says.

For three hours a week, from October to June, Pasternack used a special software program to turn Corn’s research materials into an organized file system that features a computerized database of 350 citations, complete with a keyword search, abstracts, and a bibliographical reference tool.

“Claire basically made sense of everything and got it into a form that I could call up on the computer. Before this, I had nothing on my computer because I’d started this research long before I even used one,” says Corn. “Now I’m able to write more efficiently and think much more clearly about this. It was very helpful for me because it got me centered and focused and helped me make some big decisions about the outline of the project.”

Bound by their common interest in the material, Corn and Pasternack became fast friends over the duration of their partnership. And each came away with far more than a new set of research tools.

“I was considering graduate school when I started, but as a result of this experience I know I’m definitely going,” says Pasternack, whose senior thesis on guidebooks to the Paris Exposition of 1900 was inspired by the project. “And I was leaning toward studying literature or history, but now I’m leaning toward art history.”

Working with Corn also gave Pasternack the chance to see up close what it takes to work in academic scholarship. “This was the first time I’d really interacted with a professor as a partner, helping in a small way to create this book,” she says. “It made the life of a professor seem that much more real and wonderful to me.”

In addition to getting her book on track for publication in 2006, Corn says working with Pasternack helped her to learn about undergraduate life at Harvard and compare it to her teaching experiences at Stanford. “I gained a very healthy respect for Harvard undergraduate education, which was not something I knew much about,” says Corn. “From Claire, I learned about Harvard from a student’s point of view and got a much broader picture of the University than I might have otherwise. Having contact with undergraduates was a vital part of my year at the Radcliffe Institute and extremely important in making me feel a part of the larger University.”

To learn more about the Radcliffe Research Partnership program, visit www.radcliffe.edu/fellowships/research_partnerships.aspx.

Margie Kelley is a freelance writer.

Photo of the Chicago Women's Building courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society