March 12, 2025
Graham Titus, WPAMC '25
Most people don’t like to think about death, but death was an important part of everyday life for the workers at Newman Brothers’ Coffin Furniture Manufactory. Located in the heart of Birmingham, UK’s historical Jewellery Quarter, the Coffin Works occupies the former Newman Brothers’ factory, built in 1894. The company supplied coffin furniture (handles, breastplates, crucifixes, and other ornaments) to undertakers and ...
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March 10, 2025
Estrella Salgado, WPAMC '25
With time for independent exploration built into our journey through England’s cultural and historic sites, I often searched for “Catholic church near me” and headed off to a towering Neo-Byzantine masterpiece or a futuristic midcentury cathedral. In this constant rotation between churches and museums, I reflected on their (mostly) symbiotic interplay.
Gretchen Buggeln, a professor of Christian belief and the ...
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March 05, 2025
Remson DeJoseph, Ph.D. English '26
Participating in the British Design History course as an English Ph.D. student and as someone who loves medieval manuscripts and Renaissance quartos, I was curious to know more about book printing. I couldn’t help but wonder, what sort of manuscripts or early printed books would I encounter on this trip? I knew one of the first stops on our schedule was St. Bride Library in London, so I had high hopes of seeing ...
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March 03, 2025
Katie Cynkar, WPAMC '25
From the 1767 oil painting, The Swing, by Jean-Honore Fragonard at The Wallace Collection, to a 1991 Super Nintendo at The Museum of the Home, I had the pleasure of seeing an extraordinary amount of visual and material culture on our trip to England for our British Design History course. One object stuck out to me from Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum: a punch bowl made by the Wedgwood factory in Staffordshire in 1787 ...
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