Administrator and faculty member hopes to lift early art critic out of obscurity

SHARON, Pa. - For Penn State Shenango Assistant Director of Academic Affairs and Associate Teaching Professor of English Elaine Andrews, the freedom to explore lesser-known literary figures is what keeps the job exciting and keeps classes engaging for her students.

"I think the cool thing about my teaching here [at Penn State Shenango] is that it's allowed me to teach a wide variety of general education classes where I can explore different writers, and I ran into this name that fascinated me," said Andrews, who received an Opportunity Grant for professional development from the Penn State Faculty Affairs Center for Faculty Development and Advancement in spring 2025.

The fascinating name in question was Sadakichi Hartmann, an early 20th century Japanese-German writer, art critic and poet who, according to the Academy of American Poets, was one of the first to introduce American readers to Japanese forms of poetry, such as the haiku.

Using the funds from the Opportunity Grant, Andrews traveled to the University of California, Riverside, during the summer and spent a week exploring Hartmann's writings and primary sources at the Tomás Rivera Library.

"There are maybe 40 boxes of material there. It's just this enormous body of work," Andrews said. "I've chosen to focus on his writings about photography because I've always been interested in visual arts myself and I was interested in his contributions to that field."

Hartmann's early writings and critiques about photography presented the relatively new medium as a true form of art with qualities that distinguished it from other forms of visual media and inspired the works of photographers such as Alfred Steiglitz and Ansel Adams. However, due to lingering controversies later in his life, his contributions to the emerging field of photography were largely overshadowed and forgotten, according to Andrews.

"He's fallen into obscurity, and so another reason why I'm interested in researching him is because I want to join that conversation of what people are talking about with his contributions to art history," Andrews said. "On one hand, I hear him mentioned as this very important figure in the early recognition of photography as an art. But you go to a bookstore, and you don't see his stuff."

Andrews first spoke about Hartmann and his works at the American Literature Association Conference in 2023 as part of a panel focusing on the theme of failure.

"It was interesting, this idea of failure, you could read his life that way," Andrews said.

Following her research, Andrews said she plans to shift the narrative on Hartmann's life away from failure to instead focus on the writer's important contributions to emerging art forms.

Andrews plans to incorporate unique photography assignments into her English courses at Penn State Shenango, introducing her students to the artistic theories and critiques of Hartmann, while also incorporating multiple poems and haikus from his early writing that Andrews said she believes are, "very teachable."

"Someday, I would really love to write a biography [about Hartmann], because his life is just wild," Andrews said.