CFP: Materializing Race in #VastEarlyAmerica

July 20, 2020 By The Junto Moderator in Calls for Papers, Conferences, Vast Early America Tags: Anthropology, archaeology, art history, artifacts, Black Atlantic, Call for Papers, colonial America, conferences, material culture, Native Americans, Public History, race, Slavery, social history, vastearlyamerica 1 Comment

Materializing Race: An Unconference on Objects and Identity in #VastEarlyAmerica
August 24 and 25, 2020
1 PM EST both days (Zoom)
Proposals due by August 1, 2020
Organized by Cynthia Chin and Philippe Halbert

In a commitment to fostering nuanced interpretations of early American objects and meaningful dialogue on historical constructions of race and their legacies, we propose a virtual ‘unconference’ to share and discuss scholarship on the intersections of identity and material culture in #VastEarlyAmerica. This participant-driven, lightning round-style event will be held via Zoom, with two approximately two-hour afternoon sessions conducted in English. Energized by Dr. Karin Wulf’s call for broader, more inclusive histories of early America, we seek to promote a diverse cross-section of scholarship focused on North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean before 1830.

We welcome a variety of approaches and methodologies including historical, art historical, anthropological, archaeological, visual analysis, and experimental/experiential archaeological. Proposals should be object-focused and include a brief abstract (250 words with one relevant image) for a 10-15-minute presentation, along with a short CV of no more than 2 pages. Potential questions and themes for presentations might include:

What is the next chapter in the discussion of race, ethnicity, identity, and early American material culture?
What are potential methodological approaches and revisions/additions to existing material culture frameworks? How can #VastEarlyAmerica work to expand the traditional American material culture canon?
What were some of the threads or outcomes of the 1619 Project dialogue (and other relevant publications/discussions) that relate/interact/tessellate with material culture studies? How can the 1619 Project and its surrounding narratives broaden the impact of material culture studies?
Can the outcomes or discussions surrounding this dialogue engender new approaches/methodologies and discussions in material culture studies? How might it affect the way we as historians and curators interact with and publicly present objects? Does it present the ability to see “legacy” objects and historical figures/narratives differently as a result?
Historians and material culture specialists as genealogists: how do our own personal family/ancestral narratives intersect with our study of early American history and material culture; the historian as biographer; the biographical object and the object biography
Public history: new thoughts on old things, from the exhibition and display of objects in museum settings to historical and character interpretation, to include historic trades and foodways
Object Case Studies: New interpretations of early American objects related to race, ethnicity, and identity
The influence of historical anniversaries and commemorations: Jamestown 2007, the New Orleans Tricentennial Commission, Plimoth Patuxet and Mayflower 400, the 500th anniversary of the Spanish invasion of Mexico in 2019 and the 2021 bicentennial of Mexican independence, etc.

This event is co-convened by Dr. Cynthia Chin (Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington) and Philippe Halbert (Yale History of Art). For more information, submission requirements, and audience registration details, please visit the Materializing Race website.

Early American Women Unmasked

May 5, 2020 By Philippe Halbert in Colonial Couture, Vast Early America Tags: Antigua, art history, Atlantic World, Black Atlantic, Caribbean, colonial America, Fashion, free people of color, Jamaica, Manners, Massachusetts, material culture, New England, race, Slavery, social history, vastearlyamerica, women's history 2 Comments

A special edition of #ColonialCouture, a Junto roundtable on fashion as history in early American life.

The Antigua-born Penelope Royall Vassall (masked and socially distanced), Joseph Blackburn, circa 1755, Massachusetts Historical Society

Protective face coverings have emerged as a potent, multifaceted metaphor for the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite inconsistent examples set by elected leaders and conflicting recommendations made by public health officials, unisex masks have steadily assumed a greater role in social distancing measures and become mandatory in certain settings outside the home. Options range from standard blue and white surgical masks to creative DIY improvisations and “Corona Couture.” Some museums are looking to add homemade masks to their collections as a way to document the crisis. Worn for slightly different reasons and more implicitly gendered, the masks owned by early American women and even children were no less symbolic in terms of practical use, commodification, or controversy.

Continue reading →

CFP: The Fifteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Student Symposium

December 14, 2018 By The Junto Moderator in Calls for Papers, Conferences Tags: Art, art history, Borders, conferences, frontier, material culture, settler colonialism, vastearlyamerica, visual culture 1 Comment

Basket, American China Manufactory, Philadelphia, 1770–72 , soft-paste porcelain, Yale University Art Gallery.

Encounters, Entanglements, and Exchanges
Fifteenth Annual Yale American Art History Graduate Student Symposium
Yale University, New Haven, 6 April 2019
Proposals due by 1 February 2019

Points of encounter can occur across time and space. In colonial Mexico, blue and white earthenware vessels made in the city of Puebla responded to East Asian hard-paste porcelain. At the same time, ceramic manufacturers in China adapted designs that catered to pan-American tastes, and both John Bartlam’s South Carolina pottery and the American China Manufactory in Philadelphia produced their own soft-paste porcelain wares on the eve of the American Revolution. More recently, Carrie Mae Weems’s The Hampton Project reexamined a nineteenth-century vocational school that served as a cultural crossroads for formerly enslaved African Americans, American Indians, and white Americans to raise pressing questions of race, imperialism, and nationalism in the twenty-first century. These points of convergence between individuals, groups, places, and objects often instigate shifts in creative production with lasting and global resonances. The interaction of disparate cultures offers a rich nexus for artistic creation. Yet such encounters are also inseparable from the shifting dynamics of power that operate along gendered, racial, economic, and political lines. What can exchanges and entanglements reveal about the nature of encounter? How do encounters shape exchanges? In what ways do exchanges propagate new encounters?

The Fifteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Student Symposium invites papers that interrogate the dialectical relationship between encounter and exchange and explore the legacies of cultural intersection. We invite submissions that address art across North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean, that engage a range of critical perspectives, and that speak to a variety of time periods and artistic practices.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Micro-histories that address a specific instance of encounter
• Global encounters with the notion of ‘Americanness’
• Collaborations that problematize narratives of ‘influence’ across social, cultural, or political hierarchies
• Impact of religious proselytization and conversion in the arts
• Gift exchange, diplomacy, and trade
• Appropriation, fetishism, hybridity, and mimicry
• Contact zones, borderlands, intersectionality, and peripheries
• Power dynamics within systems of colonialism, racism, homophobia, or sexism
• Immigration, migrants, and refugees
• Authorship and ownership
• Tourism and travel narratives
• Activism, coalition building, and the arts
• Networks created via technology, globalization, and media

Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 350 words along with a CV to americanist.symposium@gmail.com by 1 February 2019. Accepted participants will be notified in mid-February. Accommodations will be provided for all graduate student speakers in New Haven, Connecticut.

“A curious font of porphyry”

July 12, 2018 By Philippe Halbert in material culture, Research, Vast Early America Tags: 18th Century, Africa, Anglicanism, art history, Atlantic World, Canada, church history, colonial America, Early Canada, empire, French Atlantic, material culture, New England, New France, New Hampshire, religion, Seven Years' War Leave a comment

Screen Shot 2018-07-12 at 3.29.59 AM Working on material culture, my research has taken me to some interesting, if unexpected places. Last summer, it involved waiting outside Saint John’s Church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, founded in 1732 as the Anglican Queen’s Chapel. I quickly ran inside to snap some pictures of a baptismal font between back-to-back Sunday services. The Saint John’s font is an impressive fixture, carved from marble in a Continental European baroque style. As a ritual object used in the sacrament of baptism, the font is hardly unusual, but its story is. Continue reading →

CFP: The Fourteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium

December 9, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in Announcements, Calls for Papers, Conferences, Uncategorized Tags: Art, art history, colonial, empire, Slavery Leave a comment

We are pleased to share the following call for papers for The Fourteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium. Continue reading →

Roundtable: Crafting Protest, Fashioning Politics: DIY Lessons from the American Revolution

February 16, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables Tags: American Revolution, Art, art history, Benjamin Franklin, clothing, Copley, economic history, Fashion, France, Harvard University, History of Fashion, Iroquois, material culture, Patrick Henry, Political history, Teen Vogue, Virginia, Vogue, women, women's history, Women's March 3 Comments

This Colonial Couture post is by Zara Anishanslin, assistant professor of history and art history at the University of Delaware. Her latest book is Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016). Follow her @ZaraAnishanslin.

Homespun, Thomas Eakins, 1881, Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Please, sisters, back away from the pink.”

So women planning to attend the January 2017 Women’s Marches were urged by the writer of an opinion piece in The Washington Post. “Sorry knitters,” she continued, but making and wearing things like pink pussycat hats “undercuts the message that the march is trying to send….We need to be remembered for our passion and purpose, not our pink pussycat hats.” To back up her point, the author opined that “bra burning” dominated—and thus damaged—popular (mis)conceptions of women’s rights protests in the 1960s. Please, ladies, she exhorted, don’t repeat the mistakes we made in the ‘60s by bringing fashion into politics. Continue reading →

Roundtable: Of Records and Rituals: Native Americans and the Textile Trade

February 15, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables Tags: Art, art history, British, clothing, Dutch, economic history, Fashion, French, Historic New England, History of Fashion, material culture, museums, Native American history, Native Americans, South, southern history, Spanish, Textiles, trade, Winterthur 3 Comments

This Colonial Couture post is by Laura E. Johnson, associate curator at Historic New England. The exhibition Mementos: Jewelry of Life and Love from Historic New England, which she curated, will open at the Eustis Estate Museum in Milton, Massachusetts, in May 2017.

“Echatillons Etouffes d’angleterre a l’usage des Espagnolesen Europe y en Amerique,” (Samples of English stuffs in use by the Spanish in Europe and America), Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum and Library

I’d like to build on Kimberly Alexander’s question from last week, “How can we write history when we do not have the original object?” There are many ways to examine a textile and its context without the physical object, as she demonstrated so ably. Much of my research on Native peoples, identity construction, and the Atlantic textile trade is based by necessity on a combination of archival resources, rare portraits, and archaeological evidence. Trade records, price lists, descriptions of treaty meetings, and other archival sources offer a wide range of evidence about textiles and how Natives consumed them, even in the absence of the pieces themselves.

Textiles were among the most lucrative and desirable of imported objects in the early Atlantic economy.[1] The French, Dutch, and British all relied heavily on textile production for a substantial portion of their national revenue. Woolens and linens raised, spun, woven and finished in these areas drove international commerce from the 13th century.[2] Native Americans presented an enormous potential market for their products as the domestic market became increasingly saturated. As one scholar has stated, it could have been termed the “cloth trade as easily as the deerskin trade.”[3] Continue reading →

Roundtable: Ambassador in a Hat: The Sartorial Power of Benjamin Franklin’s Fur Cap

February 15, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables Tags: 18th Century, American Revolution, Art, art history, Benjamin Franklin, clothing, Diplomacy, diplomatic history, Early America, France, fur, History, History of Fashion 15 Comments

This Colonial Couture post is by guest contributor Joanna M. Gohmann, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in 18th– and 19th-Century Art, at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Benjamin Franklin (Augustin de Saint Aubin after Charles Nicholas Cochin, 1777, private collection)

While acting as the American ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin wore a fur hat to express his American status. The French enthusiastically accepted Franklin’s use of the topper, seeing it as an embodiment of the ambassador and a symbol of America and the American cause. When he first came to France in 1767, Franklin wore the clothes of a polite, fashionable Frenchman—a fine European suit and powdered wig—as a way to show respect to the French court. When he returned in 1776, he abandoned all the decorum of French dress and instead wore a simple, homespun brown suit, spectacles, and a large fur hat. He cleverly adopted this style as a way to garner attention and appeal to the French for support of the American cause.[1]

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Roundtable: Making American Pompons Great Again

February 13, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables Tags: Art, art history, Copley, Fashion, History of Fashion, Kensingon Palace, museums, Native Americans, New England Patriots, patriots, Pinckney, Smithsonian Institution, South Carolina, sports history, Virginia, Windsor Castle, Yale University 2 Comments

This Colonial Couture post is by guest contributor Ben Marsh, senior lecturer in history at the University of Kent. His current research project is “Unravelling Dreams: Silkworms and the Atlantic World, c. 1500-1840.”

Super Bowl LI

In July 1760, an American correspondent writing to a former neighbor in Surrey, England, graciously thanked them for dispatching a package across to South Carolina, risking the perils of transatlantic post during the Seven Years’ War, to send some cosmopolitan gifts. The gift of a fan was heralded as a “curiosity,” the suit (probably linen, though this descriptor was scored out) was apparently “universally admired,” but the real coup in the package was unquestionably the pompon. Not only was the pompon the prettiest these Americans had apparently ever seen, but the girl it was intended for was delighted “the more so as they are the first of y^e fashion that have reach[e]d this part of the world.” Continue reading →

Roundtable: Colonial Couture

February 9, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables Tags: American Revolution, Antebellum, Art, art history, Fashion, Federalism, History of Fashion, material culture, Technology 7 Comments

Christian Dior (2011) and Dorothy Quincy Hancock Scott (ca. 1772)

You’re invited…to The Junto’s first roundtable on fashion as history in early American life. In step with New York Fashion Week, we’ll present a new perspective daily on how the material question of “what people wore” shaped personal politics and national identity. We’re, er, bursting at the seams with guest contributors, so watch this space for a new post (or two!) every day. Thanks to a diverse array of scholars, over the next week we’ll get a better look at the sartorial identities of the enslaved; explore Native Americans’ role in the textile trade; take in the view from Benjamin Franklin’s Versailles; meet the artisans who bound up the loose threads of Atlantic World couture; and more. Continue reading →