I work on European and American design, architecture, art, and fashion from 1750 through the present. I’m especially interested in the various ways in which we engage with objects—and how they engage with us—both historically and in contemporary life. I look closely at the historical and technical meanings of forms and materials to understand how these factors contribute to the cultural, social, and political significance of design as both process and product. And I approach domestic objects as communicators or agents with the power to change the way we think and act. My 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.”



Over the past few years, I’ve lectured and published widely on the relation between the material of glass and the sociopolitical concept of transparency during the first decades of the twentieth century. My research has been supported by the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Central European History Society, and the Wolfsonian Museum, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corning Museum of Glass.

I’m currently working on a new project that examines dolls and other types of human figures in the history of design as a means of interrogating key aspects of subject-object relations. Dolls, puppets, automata, and robots— because of their implied, imagined, or attempted sentience—pose complex, interdisciplinary questions about agency and animacy in designed objects. While dolls aren’t designed to contain our coffee or cover our walls, they are designed to be with us, to mirror us, companion us, and to function as the objects of our myriad physical and psychological projections. We deconstruct them in search of ourselves. They are functional objects with a difference, and it’s this difference that I’m keen to pull apart. I will address these questions—and many more—in my next book, Dollatry. I am also collaborating with BGC students to mount a related Focus Project exhibition, Dollatry: Playing with Likeness, where visitors will explore issues of likeness, identity, and intersectionality as they move through the rooms of a doll house—at human scale.

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Freyja recently appeared on Jonathan Van Ness’s podcast, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, to discuss disability representation in dolls, why some kids harm their dolls, and what makes play so important. Check out the episode here!