Invited Participants
Karlyn Allenbrand is a second-year MA student completing her degree in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture studies at Bard Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the intersections of design, technology, and culture in the twentieth century. Recently, she completed her Qualifying Paper, investigating the technological, commercial, and social factors contributing to the incorporation of solar energy into consumer products and larger infrastructural projects in the United States during the Cold War. Leveraging her background as a designer, she assists the Digital Humanities and Digital Exhibitions department at BGC, collaborating with Public Humanities to design websites, in-gallery digital interactives, and educational materials for BGC Gallery. She holds a BFA in Fibers from the Savannah College of Art and Design and has held archival positions at R & Company and AIGA. This fall, Karlyn will be joining the History Department at UD as a PhD student in the Hagley Program.
Dr. Sarah Carter is Executive Director of the Center for Design and Material Culture and Associate Professor in Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). She has served as the Curator and Director of Research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she collaboratively curated many museum exhibitions and directed Chipstone’s Think Tank Program in support of progressive curatorial practice. She is the author of Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (Oxford, 2018) and a coauthored book, Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects (Oxford, 2015). She is co-editor with Ivan Gaskell of the forthcoming thirty-essay collection, The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (2020). Her work has also appeared in Common-Place, Avidly, a channel of the LA Review of Books, and the Washington Post.
Dr. Deborah Dorotinsky is a full time researcher in the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM and professor of Historiography of Art, History of photography, Visual Culture and gender in Latin America in the Art History Graduate Program, which she has chaired from 2011 to 2017. She has published extensively in Spanish on the topics of visual imagery and ethnic identity, “indigenismo” and photography and of late on visual culture and gender in Mexico (1920-1950). She was Academic Coordinator of the Visual Culture and Gender area in the Gender Studies Program (PUEG) in UNAM (2008-2010). She is co-editor of the book Encauzar la mirada: Arquitectura, pedagogía e imágenes en México 1920-1950 (2010) on the history of images and architecture in the school experience and education programs in México between 1920 and 1940. Her book, Viaje de Sombras: Fotografías del Desierto de la Soledad y los Indios Lacandones en los Años Cuarenta, on the photographic construction of the Lacandon Rain-Forest and the Lacandon Indians, was published by Instituto de Investigaciones Estética, UNAM, in 2013.
Katie Garth is a print-based artist in Philadelphia. Her interdisciplinary work explores tedium as a coping mechanism for uncertainty, and often reflects her interests in language and independent publication. Garth received her MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art and a BFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has exhibited internationally, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post and PRINT. Garth co-founded Quarantine Public Library with Tracy Honn in 2020. She is Visiting Assistant Professor in Printmaking at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches at several Philadelphia-area universities.
Dr. Freyja Hartzell is associate professor at Bard Graduate Center in New York City, where she works on European and American design, architecture, art, and fashion from 1750 through the present. She also serves as Editor of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Her book, Richard Riemerschmid’s Extraordinary Living Things (MIT Press, 2022), reveals how Munich artist Richard Riemerschmid’s early twentieth-century designs for housewares, furniture, interiors, clothing, textiles, and wallpapers compel us to rethink what it means to be “modern.” Her current project focuses on dolls as vehicles for exploring conceptions of identity and likeness, and as objects that prompt us to question our understanding of subject-object relations in everyday life. Her related exhibition, Dollatry: Playing With Likeness, will open at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in February 2025, and a new book of the same title will appear subsequently with MIT Press.
Maeve Hogan is a PhD candidate in design history at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). Her research has focused on craft and domestic material culture as they relate to modernity, nostalgia, women’s work, and the formulation of identity. She works closely with the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection. A group of understudied new tapestries and fiber art objects made in the 1950s and 1960s that she located within the collection forms the jumping off point for her dissertation. Maeve holds an MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, and a BA in art history and studio art from Clark University. Before coming to UW–Madison, she was (among other things) a curatorial associate at the New-York Historical Society and a teaching assistant at the New York School of Interior Design.
Dr. Christina Ionescu is Director and co-founder of the new Visual and Material Culture Studies Program at Mount Allison University in Canada. She is an eighteenth-century scholar with an interest in book illustration, visual and material cultures, as well as word and image theory. She is the editor of a double issue of the Journal of Illustration on extra-illustration as a bibliographic and cultural phenomenon (2021) and co-editor, with Leigh G. Dillard, of a special issue of 1650-1850: Ideas, Inquiries, and Aesthetics in the Early Modern Era on the cultural ramifications of water (2024). Her journal articles have appeared in Cahiers du GADGES, Image & Narrative, Le Livre et l’estampe, and Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, amongst other venues. She is currently preparing a multivolume companion to eighteenth-century book illustration with Leigh G. Dillard, the first volume of which will be published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
Miranda King:
Miranda King is a first-year MA student at Brock University studying Classics in the Art and Archaeology stream. Her current research interests include the visual and material culture of Roman households, accessibility in curatorial practices focusing on classical objects, and cataloging practices at archaeology sites. She has taught at Mount Allison University under supervision for 3 years with classes on the topic of internet pop culture and anime. Her teaching focuses on allowing students to better understand their learning styles through alternative forms of assessment and learning experiences.
Abi Lua is currently the Assistant Curator at the James A. Michener Art Museum. In her curatorial and academic work, Abi is interested in partnering with cultural stakeholders, artists, and museum and academic professionals to steward cultural heritage. During her graduate study at the University of Delaware and the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, she has focused these interests through her research on Philippine piña (or pineapple leaf) textiles, examining their cultural histories, craft, and materiality. At the Michener, Abi has broadened her focus to the art and material culture of the Delaware Valley Region. Working alongside these global and local communities, she leverages artistic knowledge in her research to expand upon dominant histories of these regions.
Michelle Moseley is an Associate Professor of Art History in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech. Her research area at Virginia Tech is Early Modern Europe c. 1400-1700, and she teaches Renaissance and Baroque Europe along with Medieval, and globally-focused courses. She is co-Director of the MA Program in Material Culture and Public Humanities. Current research projects focus on female collectors and collections from the Early Modern Netherlands, with a focus on the Early Modern Dutch dollhouse as collector’s cabinet with a global reach. Her work has been supported by an RSA Kress-Bodleian Library Fellowship at the University of Oxford, and a fellowship at the Scaliger Institute, Leiden University. A book titled At Home in the Early Modern Dutch Dollhouse: Gender, Materiality, and Collecting in the Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-century is under contract with Amsterdam University Press.
Savannah Penven is a second-year graduate student in the Material Culture and Public Humanities Master’s Program at Virginia Tech and anticipates graduating in May 2024. Savannah received her Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Museum Studies from Radford University in 2020. Savannah is currently writing her master’s thesis, “Feminist Curating in University Art Institutions within the Appalachian Region,” which examines the feminist curatorial methodology utilized at three university art institutions and offers a comparative analysis between practical curatorial approaches and prior curatorial scholarship. In addition to pursuing her graduate degree, Savannah works as an Exhibition Programs Assistant at the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech. Savannah presented her research at the Southeastern College Art Conference in 2019 and 2023 and the Virginia Association of Museums Annual Conference in 2020.
Ariadna Solís is a PhD student at the Graduate Art History Program at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She is a second-generation migrant Yalalteca woman, dedicated to research, writing, teaching and different textile tasks. She is part of the Dill Yel Nbán collective, a group for the transmission and dissemination of the Zapotec language and culture. Her lines of research focus on the study of the representation of indigenous women in visual culture, textiles, feminisms and anti-colonial struggles.
Kedron Thomas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. Her current research centers on the culture and politics of the fashion industry, particularly issues of environmental sustainability and labor rights in globalized supply chains. She is co-PI on ReSpool, a collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator that addresses post-consumer fashion waste in the United States through the construction of equitable regional ecosystems for textile recycling and remanufacture. She also maintains an active research program with indigenous Maya communities in Guatemala on the production of textiles and fashion and the politics of style and identity. She is the author of Regulating Style: Intellectual Property Law and the Business of Fashion in Guatemala and is an internationally-recognized expert on fashion sustainability, informal economies, the globalization of intellectual property law, and indigenous politics in Latin America.