Symposium: Homemaking: Race, Place, and Ethnicity in the New England Household, 04.03.2023, Wellesley/MA and virtual space

Wellesley College: Deerfield Symposium (Web)

Time: 04.03.2023
Venue: Wellesley College/MA and virtual space

This one-day symposium will explore the visual and material cultures of race and ethnicity in New England’s domestic sphere from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Cultural and racial diversity have long characterized New England’s domestic environments and symposium participants will present research on the varied ways in which the region’s households were shaped by perceptions of, ideas about, and attitudes toward race and ethnicity. The event is free and open to the public; registration required. To register and to receive a link to the livestream (if needed) please complete the form here (Web).

Programme

  • 9:00: Welcome – Martha McNamara (Wellesley Coll.) and Barbara Mathews (Historic Deerfield, Inc.)
  • 9:15 Keynote – Marla Miller (Univ. of Massachusetts): Race, Place, & Entangled Homemaking: Views from Hadley, Massachusetts

10:30 Panel 1: Contested Household Space: 17th & 18th Centuries

  • Caylin Carbonell (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture): Households of Unfreedom in Colonial New England
  • Cornelia Dayton (Univ. of Connecticut): John and Phillis Peters Move to a Middleton Farmstead

11:30 Panel 2: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Colonial Revival Movement

  • Lisa Botshon (Univ. of Maine at Augusta): Mid-Century Maine Rustication Narratives and the Making of the White Middle Class
  • Alexandra Peck (Univ. of British Columbia): Pueblo Pottery at Nonotuck? Smith College’s Female Collectors Bring the American Southwest to New England
  • Megan Horn (The Newport Art Museum): Negotiating Identity and Visualizing Regional Imagination in Harriette Merrifield Forbes’ Photographs of Early New England Houses

12:45 Lunch Break

  • Poster Session: Courtney Garrity, Catherine Zipf, Eleanor Langham, and Lynn Smith (Bristol Historical & Preservation Society): ‘Negro Child, est £43’: Revising the History of Enslavement in Bristol, RI

2:00 Panel 3: Extending the Household, Creating Community

  • Mary Freeman (Univ. of Maine): The Abyssinian Meeting House and the Politics of Domestic Space in Nineteenth-Century Portland, Maine
  • Psyche Williams-Forson (Univ. of Maryland): ‘When I visit Ma Smith’s Lodging House…’ Black Material Culture, Domestic Performance, and U.S. Citizenship
  • Mia Michael (Boston Coll.): Defying the Status Quo: Domestic Workers’ Mobilization in Boston, Massachusetts, 1960s-1970s

3:15 Panel 4: Visualizing Home, Constructing Legacies

  • Mariah Kupfner (Penn State Harrisburg): ‘Silent Companion’: Searching for Phyllis and Finding Enslavement in the New England Domestic Interior
  • Jennifer Thorn (Saint Anselm Coll.): ‘As if she alone was heir’: The Domestic Spaces of Phebe Ann Jacobs
  • Sonia Pacheco (Univ. of Massachusetts): When a Calendar Isn’t Just a Calendar: The Varied Role of Calendars in Portuguese American Households in the Early 20th Century

Source: H-Net Notifications