September 11, 2023
Cecelia Eure, WPAMC '24
Figure 1: A desk from the Wallace Collection. Photo by the author.
On our trip to England for British Design History, I had the joy of seeing many beautiful pieces of material culture. From large collections like the Victoria & Albert museum to smaller spaces like Dennis Severs’ house in Spitalfields, we saw a wide range of British design and antiques. In most of the spaces we entered, the public wasn't allowed to ...
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September 01, 2022
Sylvia Hickman, WPAMC '23
Kerista was an urban commune based in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, which I had the pleasure of studying as part of a class on the material culture of America's communal utopias. Active in its most successful iteration from 1971 to 1991, Kerista was a small group of no more than 30 people at any given time. They were most known for their practice of polyfidelity, a form of non-monogamy in which ...
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August 05, 2022
Abi Lua WPAMC '22
A couple weeks prior to our Southern Trip, our professors asked our class what cultural heritage sites we would want to see during our trip. In light of my research interests, I requested to visit sites that reflected connections between the South and global material culture. Whenever I would think about global material culture and the U.S., I most often think of ...
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July 22, 2022
Grace Ford-Dirks, WPAMC '23
Our recent field study trip to the American South gave us a brief glimpse into many different “Souths.” At every new site, however, we continued to confront questions of absence and presence. We visited rare surviving quarters for the enslaved in Virginia and South Carolina, and in contrast, saw a thoughtful reconstruction of enslaved quarters on Somerset Plantation in North Carolina that mediated some of the persistent ...
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