Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: oral history, digital history, material culture, quilts, quiltmaking, New Deal, Great Depression

About Me: Janneken Smucker is a professor and historian specializing in digital history, public history, and material culture at West Chester University. Publications include Amish Quilts: Crafting and American Icon (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) and A New Deal for Quilts (International Quilt Museum, 2023, co-winner of the Living New Deal Book Award), exploring the federal government’s practical and symbolic uses of quilts during the Great Depression. A former co-editor of the Oral History Association’s journal, Oral History Review, she hosts and co-produces Running Stitch: A QSOS Podcast, drawing on oral histories with contemporary quiltmakers. She was a curatorial consultant for Pattern and Paradox: The Quilts of Amish Women at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and author of the book of the same name. She lives in Philadelphia with her 14-year-old daughter, where she is an avid cyclist, yogi, and participant in civic life.

Recent Publications: A New Deal for Quilts, International Quilt Museum with University of Nebraska Press, 2023.

Pattern and Paradox: The Quilts of Amish Women, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Association with Giles, Ltd., 2024

Amish Quilts: Crafting an American Icon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

“Quilts, Social Engineering, and Black Power in the Tennessee Valley,” Southern Cultures (Spring 2022).

“Philadelphia Immigration Stories: Making the Aural, Visual,” in Performing Memory: Corporeality Visuality, and Mobility after 1968, ed. Luisa Passerini and Dieter Reinisch (forthcoming from Palgrave Press, 2023).

“Tracking the Amish Quilt: Warren and Jane Rohrer’s Search for a Usable Past,” in Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer, forthcoming from Pennsylvania State University Press and the Palmer Museum of Art, 2020.