Aaron Glass hosted the bi-annual meeting of the faculty council of the Otsego Institute for Native American Art History at Bard Graduate Center, May 18–21.

Deborah Krohn gave a paper entitled “Food, Knowledge, and Culture: Cooking, Carving, and Folding” at the conference Europe Without Borders: Reflections on Forty Years of European Cultural Studies at Princeton, held at Princeton University, May 12–14. Organized to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the European Cultural Studies Program, in which Krohn participated as an undergraduate, the conference featured a wide selection of current students, alumni, and faculty members and concluded with a memorial service for Carl Schorske, the program’s founder.

Andrew Morrall gave a lecture: “The Cosmos of the Urban Craftsman in Early Modern Northern Europe,” at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and presented a draft book chapter, “Plato among the Artisans,” to the University’s Medieval and Early Modern Colloquium, April 8–10.

On April 21, Andrew Morrall and Deborah Krohn co-organized a day-long workshop at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., entitled “Cultural Histories of the Material World: Early Modern Books and Objects.” Based on the Folger’s rich collection, the event drew scholars from the United States and Great Britain. Bard Graduate Center was well represented: Michele Majer presented on the relation between female Shakespearean costumes and contemporary fashions in the late nineteenth century; Krohn spoke in the session Early Modern Texts and Cultural Practices: Food Knowledge, Natural History; and Morrall presented in a session on Tudor and Stuart embroidered book covers, ably chaired by former MA student, Sophie Pitman, currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge.

Elizabeth Simpson gave a lecture in April on “Woodworking at Gordion in Its Near Eastern Context,” at the symposium, “The World of Phrygian Gordion,” held in conjunction with the exhibition, The Golden Age of King Midas, on view through November 2016 at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia. The exhibition features ancient Phrygian objects excavated at the site of Gordion in Turkey, as well as contemporary artifacts from the first millennium B.C. found at other Near Eastern sites. Simpson is director of the Gordion Furniture Project and a consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. In May, she lectured on “Wooden Furniture from Verucchio and Gordion,” at an international workshop and symposium in Rome entitled “Material Connections and Artistic Exchange: The Case of Etruria and Anatolia.” This was the first large multi-disciplinary academic conference to explore the similarities in Etruscan and Anatolian material culture, as well as their implications for the origins of the “mysterious Etruscans.”

Ittai Weinryb organized a session on the medieval “wearable” with Elizabeth Williams of Dumbarton Oaks at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 12–15. The session investigated attitudes toward the wearable in medieval culture, dealing not only with textile and metal work but also with tattoos, cosmetics, and hairstyles.

Catherine Whalen and David Jaffee organized and led the tenth annual meeting of the Consortium for American Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center, May 12–13. Established by Dean Peter Miller in 2007, the event brings together scholars from leading institutions in the field of American material culture studies.