Above: I examine a riding coat from designer Harry Collins as part of my personal archive building and research during COVID-19, summer 2020.
As a historian I center both visual and material culture in my work. I’m a scholar of the seemingly frivolous things that everyone tends to ignore. In essence, I study the images and things that we’ve gotten rid of because they “weren’t important.” Objects are not only a major source of evidence, but often arethe impetus of many of my questions.
My dissertation complicates the history of the birth of American dress by examining the political and ideological roots of fashion trends of the 1910s and 1920s that fostered an explosion of design and aesthetic education, all of which ultimately culminated in the “American style” of the WWII era. With particular attention to race, I examine politically- and ideologically- motivated dress campaigns directed by and aimed toward White America, including Manhattan-based American Fashion for American Women (AFFAW) and Designed in America (DIA), and the Chicago-based Fashion Art League of America (FALA). This project also, however, explores the resistance to these White fashion campaigns by Native American and Black dressmakers, designers, educators, and activists who chose to embrace traditional cultural aesthetics or support Parisian styles. In looking at both the creation of a white “American style” and counters to it, my goal is to understand how the pursuit of a nationalized fashion design aesthetic was entrenched in eugenic and euthenic theory, race science, nativism, nationalism, and cultural imperialism. This project proposes a significant chronological shift in the emergence of the modern American fashion industry, while offering a new political and cultural history of Progressive Era America through the lens of the visual and material culture of dress, fashion design, and gender history. “From Paul Revere to Plains Indians and Peruvian Textiles” uncovers the fashion industry’s role in promoting and challenging Progressive Era ideologies, a history that, until now, has yet to be studied.
In 2022 / 2023 I am completing my dissertation work with support from the University of Delaware Dissertation Fellowship and a Huntington Library short-term research fellowship. My work has also been supported by a Winterthur Museum, Library & Garden Dissertation fellowship, the Center for Material Culture Studies, and the Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey Societies of the National Association of the Colonial Dames of America among others.
Most recently I've given public talks at the University of Delaware Graduate Student Seminar Series “Nationalism, Eugenics, and the Politics of American Fashion in the Progressive Era,” October 20, 2021, Winterthur Research Happy Hour, "Puritan, Pilgrim, Indian Princess, and Colonial Woman: Tropes of the American Female and How They Shaped Fashion in Progressive Era America." June 10, 2021., The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, “First Ladies Fashions 1920 & 2020: Reflecting and Shaping National Politics April 21, 2021, and The Maryland Historical Society (now the Maryland Center for History and Culture) as part of their 2019 Francis Scott Key Lecture Series with “The Golden Age of Baltimore Dressmaking: 1880-1920.”