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Project Content
This National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute
2017, American Material Culture:
Nineteenth-Century New York, is a four-week program of seminars, visits to
historic sites and museum collections, walking tours, and workshops devoted to
hands-on engagement with objects. Organized thematically, each week is co-led
by the Project Directors (Catherine
Whalen and Katherine C. Grier) and guest faculty. Special attention will be paid to material culture
studies, methodology, and pedagogy. Readings highlight key texts in the field
alongside New York City case studies. During the Institute, Summer Scholars
will have individual consultations with guest faculty and the Project
Directors. Instruction in digital media applications and resources is available
and encouraged. Participants will have the opportunity to share their own work
in a lively, collegial setting.
The Institute will kick off with an
introduction to nineteenth-century New York and American material culture
studies. The first week (July 3 & 5–7) will commence with a guided
exploration of the city’s history and environs, including a walking tour.
Librarians will orient participants to the academic collections at Bard
Graduate Center in addition to other local research repositories. Jesse
Merandy, Director of the Bard Graduate Center Digital Media Lab, will provide a
survey of digital tools and online resources for material culture scholarship
and teaching. Project Directors will lead a seminar on the historiography of
American material culture studies and a range of approaches drawn from art
history, decorative arts studies, social and cultural history, and
anthropology. They will also conduct an artifact analysis workshop utilizing
the Bard Graduate Center Study Collection. At the New-York Historical Society,
guest faculty member Debra Schmidt-Bach, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts,
will lead a hands-on session on New York silver. She will demonstrate methods
of material and stylistic analysis while conveying her extensive knowledge of
production techniques, the interrelationship of craft and industry, and social
and cultural import of these objects. There will also be a tour of the
reinstalled Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture and new
Center for Women’s History.
The following week, “New York,
High and Low” (July 10–14) will begin with a seminar led by the Project
Directors on new modes of domestic interiors vis-à-vis issues of class, gender,
ethnicity, and race. They will pay close attention to consumerism, immigrant
culture, and the rising bourgeois; the spatial, performative, and ideological
centrality of parlor culture; and specific practices of “parlor
making” with artifacts and texts. The Project Directors will conduct a
hands-on workshop delving into more strategies for analyzing, researching, and
teaching material culture. Instruction in digital media applications will also
be available. Site visits to museums and historic sites will showcase a wide
range of nineteenth-century material culture. Curators and educators will
present their exemplary collections, approaches to display, and interpretive
goals. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Amelia Peck, Curator of American
Decorative Arts, will share her expertise on the American Wing’s redesigned
period rooms and galleries. A behind-the-scenes tour of the Lower East Side
Tenement Museum led by David Favaloro, Director of Curatorial Affairs and the
Hebrew Technical Institute Research Fellow, will offer special insight into how
this grass-roots institution imparts the story of 97 Orchard Street’s immigrant
working class residents. Additionally, a full-day field trip to nearby New
Jersey will introduce participants to several cultural institutions of
outstanding value for the study of nineteenth-century American material
culture. These are the Newark Museum, noted for its outstanding collections and
innovative interpretation of the adjacent Ballantine House; and Glenmont, the
home of Thomas Edison, where Curator Beth Miller will lead an in-depth tour.
These two residences reveal the stratified social and labor relations among
owners, designers, tradespeople, and servants, further fluctuating with the
implementation of new household technologies ranging from central heating to
refrigeration to electricity. These sites also highlight this region’s
historical importance to the greater New York metropolitan area.
“Space and Place” will be
the theme of week three (July 17–21). Here the focus will be on New York’s
increasingly complex social and spatial differentiation over the course of the
nineteenth century. Guest faculty member Bernard Herman, Professor of American
Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will guide this
week’s instruction along with the Project Directors. Herman will lead two
seminars, the first of which will address cultural landscapes and vernacular
architecture, emphasizing the far-reaching impact of the city’s grid pattern
and the growth of middle-class row houses and artisans’ dwellings. The subject
of his second seminar will be the study of material culture studies from the
vantage points of historical archaeology and foodways. Three sessions with
other guest faculty will explore the histories of diverse New York communities
while modeling how participants can use site visits in their teaching and
research. Jack Tchen, Associate Professor of History and Asian/Pacific/American
Studies at New York University, will lead a walking tour of Chinatown’s Chatham
Square and a trip to the Museum of the Chinese in America. Tchen will speak
about his research on nineteenth-century New York’s Asian American community.
Public historian Cynthia Copeland will guide a visit to the Seneca Village site
in Central Park, and discuss how archaeological and archival research helped
resurrect this African-American and Irish immigrant enclave, displaced by the
Park’s construction in the 1850s. At the American Museum of Natural History,
Professor Ivan Gaskell of Bard Graduate Center will conduct a behind-the-scenes
workshop on Native American material culture collected during the nineteenth
century. This session will highlight issues surrounding the formation of these
collections and the foundations of museum anthropology.
The fourth and final week (July
24–28) will begin with a focus on visual culture, led by guest faculty member
Joshua Brown, Professor of History at the City University of New York’s
Graduate Center. He will conduct two
seminars, one on the burgeoning literature of visual culture studies and its
relation to material culture, and the other on specific print genres, including
woodcuts, lithographs, photographs, half tones, cartoons, illustrated
periodicals, and newspapers. Here they will address production techniques,
circulation, and pluralities of cultural meanings. In addition, Brown will lead
a hands-on session at the New-York Historical Society’s Print Room, with
special attention to the changing visibility of immigrant communities in prints
and serial publications. He will also discuss how to use new media to research
and teach American material and visual culture, drawing upon his ample
experience with the American Social History Project. Rounding out the Institute
is a full-day field trip to the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven,
Connecticut, where guest faculty member Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Professor of the
History of Art at Yale University, will lead two material culture workshops.
These will be held in the Gallery’s Object Study Classroom and the Furniture
Study. Summer Scholars will work directly with the collections while Cooke
provides instruction about changing modes of production in nineteenth-century
American ceramics and furniture. The Institute will conclude with a review of
Summer Scholars’ projects, wrap-up session, and plans for future work.
Sample projects include but are not
limited to the following: a research project; a digital project; a syllabus for
a course incorporating material culture studies; or, a module on material
culture studies that could be integrated into multiple courses. Summer Scholars
will present their projects in a workshop format, highlighting new developments
based on their Institute experience and plans for integrating the results into
their teaching or other venues.
Please view Recommended Readings.
Please note that the schedule of events is subject to
revision. See Project Faculty and Staff for instructor bios.
Please direct all application inquiries to:
nehinstitute@bgc.bard.edu, and for more details visit the Application
Instructions and Contact Information page.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations
expressed in this program do not necessarily reflect those of the National
Endowment for the Humanities.
