Marni is a professor of history at Princeton University. She received her PhD in history from Yale University and began her career as a photography curator at the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas. She later taught American studies and history at Amherst College for twenty years before taking her post at Princeton. Marni consults broadly on issues relating to the use of visual images for historical research and teaching.
Martha (Marni) A. Sandweiss is professor of history at Princeton University. She received her PhD in history from Yale University and began her career as a photography curator at the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas. She later taught American studies and history at Amherst College for twenty years before taking her post at Princeton.
The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Marni is the author or editor of numerous books on American history and photography. Her publications include “Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line” (2009), the extraordinary story of Clarence King, a 19th-century white explorer, geologist and writer who, for 13 years, lived a double life as a black Pullman porter and steel worker named James Todd, and “Print the Legend: Photography and the American West” (2002), winner of the Organization of American Historians’ Ray Allen Billington Award for the best book in American frontier history and the William P. Clements Award. In this work, Marni offers a cultural history of photography in the American West during the 19th century that tracks how the new medium of photography created and shaped popular understanding of the region.
Her other works include “Laura Gilpin: An Enduring Grace”, winner of the George Wittenborn Award for outstanding art book of 1987, and the co-edited volume “The Oxford History of the American West” (1994), recipient of the Western Heritage Award and the Caughey Western History Association prize for the year’s outstanding book in western history.
Marni serves on the governing boards of the Organization of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society, and consults broadly on issues relating to the use of visual images for historical research and teaching.