Participant Info

First Name
Erin
Last Name
Holmes
Country
United States
State
Affiliation
Virginia Military Institute
Website URL
erinmarieholmes.com
Keywords
Early American, Barbados, Atlantic World, Slavery, Architectural History, Material Culture, Visual Culture, Sensory History, Colonialism, Public History, Preservation, Museum Studies
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
I can also be contacted at emholmesphd@gmail.com
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

ABOUT

I am a  social, cultural, and political historian of Early America, slavery, and the built environment, in addition to being a public historian specializing in historic preservation and museum studies. I have particularly studied the architectural history, archaeology, and material culture of the American South (particularly Virginia and South Carolina) and the Atlantic World in the 17th and early-18th centuries. I graduated with my Ph.D. in History from the University of South Carolina in 2017 and my dissertation was titled “Within the House of Bondage: Constructing and Negotiating the Plantation Landscape in the British Atlantic World, 1670-1820.” At the University of South Carolina, I also completed a Certificate in Historical Archaeology and Cultural Resource Management (CRM) in the Department of Anthropology. My comps fields were US History to 1877 (18th Century – Dr. Danial Littlefield, 19th Century – Dr. Mark Smith), a composite field on architectural history, built environment, landscape, and material culture (Dr. Lydia Brandt), and the Atlantic World 1450-1850 (Dr. Matt Childs). Prior to my doctoral work, I graduated from the College of William and Mary with a B.A. in History (where I completed an honors thesis on the evolution of the staircase in Virginia architecture under the direction of Dr. James P. Whittenburg) and a Certificate in Early American History and Museum Studies from the National Institute of American History and Democracy (NIAHD).

I was the 2017-2019 Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow at the American Philosophical Society where I served as co-curator for the 2018 exhibition (In Franklin’s Footsteps: 275 Years at the American Philosophical Society) and the lead curator for the 2019 exhibition (Mapping a Nation: Shaping the Early American Republic), which had the highest visitation of any exhibition at the APS Museum before or since (190,702 visitors from April-December 2019). I then spent three years at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political History before accepting the position of Visiting Assistant Professor of Public History in the Department of History at the University of Missouri. 

I am now the Visiting Assistant Professor of Early American History at the Virginia Military Institute. I am currently working on my manuscript project, The House that Slavery Built: Social and Material Transformation in the 18th Century British Atlantic World, and several articles.

Recent Publications

“A Few Technical Items: Questions About 18th Century Surveying Instruments Answered (Part II),” American Philosophical Society Blog, December 17, 2019

“A Few Technical Items: Questions About 18th Century Surveying Instruments Answered (Part I),” American Philosophical Society Blog, December 12, 2019.

“The Study of Man (Done by Women),” American Philosophical Society Blog, January 31, 2019.

“Mount Vernon’s Staircases: Stepping into the Past,” Mount Vernon Magazine, Spring 2018, p.54-55.

“Historical Hat-Trick: Using Documents, Architecture, and Archaeology at George Washington’s Mount Vernon,” AHA Today, August 10, 2016.

“The Other Drayton Hall: South Carolina Plantation Architecture in the Documentary Record,” AHA Today, July 20, 2016.

“Change over Time Written in the Historic Architecture of Barbados,” AHA Today, June 29, 2016.

“Visiting the Past and the Places in Between: Buildings and Landscapes as Historical Documents,” AHA Today, June 8, 2016.

“Review: Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond by Hillel Schwartz,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Summer 2014).

Media Coverage
Country Focus
United States, Barbados
Expertise by Geography
Atlantic, Caribbean, North America, United States
Expertise by Chronology
17th century, 18th century
Expertise by Topic
American Revolution, American Founding Era, Art & Architectural History, Colonialism, Libraries & Archives, Material Culture, Politics, Public History, Rebellion & Revolution, Slavery