What’s a “bad thing”? Find out at the 13th-Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars

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We are pleased to announce the schedule for Very Bad Things: Material Culture and Disobedience. This free Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars will be held on Saturday, April 11, 2015, at the Winterthur Museum.

To register, please email emerging.scholars@gmail.com.

VERYBADTHINGSFINALVery Bad Things: Material Culture and Disobedience 

8:15 – Registration
8:45 – Welcome Remarks

9:00 – Session 1: Beneath the Surface

“Flying from What? Why, a Bit of Painted Wood”: A Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of Dummy Boards and Deception in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia
Katie McKinney and Emily Wroczynski, Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and Winterthur Program in Art Conservation, University of Delaware

Under Pressure: The Material and Political Resistance of Mezzotints
Amy Torbert, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History, University of Delaware

A Silver Brand: Slave Brands and Branding in the Early Modern Atlantic World
Erin Holmes, Ph.D Candidate, Department of History, University of South Carolina

Commentator: Catherine Dann Roeber, Development Officer, Major Gifts, Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library

10:30 – Coffee Break

11:00 – Keynote Address
Auntie Steward
Speaker: Scott Herring, Associate Professor of English, Indiana University

12:00 – Lunch Break

1:00 – Session 2: The Inside Out/The Outside In

“It’s a Lone Thing – and I’m a Lone Thing”: Bad Currency and the Miser’s Economy in Silas Marner
Meg Dobbins, Ph.D. Candidate, English, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Washington University in St. Louis

Picturing the Black Home: The Visual and Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century African American Activism
Whitney Stewart, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Rice University

A “Blight” and a “Nuisance”: Billboards, Spectaculars, and Outdoor Advertising in American Cities, 1900-1920
Craig Lee, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History, University of Delaware

Commentator: Katherine Fama, NEH Research Fellow, Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library

2:30 – Break

2:45 – Session 3: The Deviant Body

Overcoming a Sensational Icon: Ku Klux Klan Robes as Historical Evidence
Katherine Lennard, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of American Culture, University of Michigan

Dangerously Empowered by Iron: Basement Gyms and Excitement about Bodybuilding in the late USSR
Alexey Golubev, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, University of British Columbia

The Romanticization of Resistance: The Contradictions and Failures of the Zapatista Doll
Erin Sexton, American Studies Department, George Washington University

Grave Goods: The Disquieting Contents of Singaporean Burial Plots
Ruth E. Toulson, Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, Penn Humanities Forum/Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Commentator: Sandy Isenstadt, Professor, Department of Art History, University of Delaware

4:30 – Tours of Winterthur

To register, please email emerging.scholars@gmail.com.