Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: 19th century American culture, museum studies, material culture, history of science and technology, American literature

About Me: I am a scholar, teacher, and curator with expertise in nineteenth-century American culture.

As Assistant Director of Studies and a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard, I teach courses on American Studies, museum studies, and material culture. I also teach in the Museum Studies program at the Harvard Extension School. I have guest curated two exhibits at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, including an online exhibit focused on the early history of women at the museum, the collections they worked on, and their legacy for future researchers.

My book, Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, a literary and cultural history of the development of American museums, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2021.

I received my PhD in English from Boston University in 2016 and my AB in English from Harvard University in 2009. My research has been supported by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College and short-term research fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, American Philosophical Society, Boston Athenaeum, Hagley Museum, Huntington Library, Smithsonian Libraries, and Winterthur Museum. My work has been published in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and Early American Literature.

Expertise by Topic: American Founding Era, Art & Architectural History, Libraries & Archives, Literary History, Material Culture, Museums, Public History, Science, Women