Benjamin D. Lisle is a cultural historian of the United States. He teaches American Studies and Integrated Studies at Colby College. His current work examines the modernist stadiums planned and constructed after World War II—from the visionary designs of Norman Bel Geddes to the derivative “concrete donuts” of the 1970s—considering how the stadium expressed and influenced urban change and the urban experience in the postwar era. Read: “Materiality and Meaning: Synthetic Grass, Sport, and the Limits of Modern Progress”
bdlisle at colby dot edu | bdlisle.com
Laura Walikainen Rouleau is a doctoral candidate in the American Civilization Program in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Laura co-chaired the seventh annual Material Culture Symposium in 2009. Her dissertation explores spaces that bridged the boundary between public and private space in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Read: “The Materiality of Privacy: Private Spaces in Public Places”
Xiao Situ is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at Yale University. She specializes in nineteenth-century to mid-twentieth-century visual and material culture in the U.S. and Britain, particularly the intersection of art and literature and the interplay between fine arts and domestic material objects. She is the 2013-2014 Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Read: “Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of Glass”
xiao dot situ at yale dot edu
Zachary J. Violette is a doctoral candidate in American and New England Studies at Boston University. His research investigates the role that the ornamentation and decoration of urban tenements played in forming and contesting cultural meaning between immigrants and Progressive reformers at the turn of the twentieth century. Read: “Ornament and Identity in the Immigrant-Built Tenements of Boston and New York, 1870-1920”
zviolette at gmail dot com