Draft Program for Our Next Conference

The Colonial Society of Massachusetts and
The Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Fields of Vision: The Material and Visual Culture of
New England, 1600-1830

November 9 & 10, 2007
Worcester, Massachusetts

A conference sponsored by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society in association with Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Given the explosion of scholarship in cultural history over the past twenty-five years, what now is the place of objects in the study of the past? What role do material and visual culture studies play in scholarly conversations that range over topics as diverse as race, sexuality, gender, nationalism, ethnicity, power and global interaction? In turn, in the face of increasingly trans-national scholarship in early America what can we gain from attention paid to a single region and its artifacts?

Presenters and participants in the conference will discuss these and other questions as a way of rethinking not just the material and visual world of early New England, but also the techniques by which we can uncover meaning in historic objects and images.

While focused on New England artifacts, Friday afternoon’s presentations will turn our attention away from regional particularities to situate objects and images in trans-Atlantic and global contexts. Another panel will reexamine the relationships of objects—from pottery shards to merchant houses—to their economic contexts and assertions of cultural authority. Concepts of memory and remembrance as both public and private expression; the interplay between object and text, and the animacy and sensuality of objects for both maker and viewer will frame sessions on Saturday that examine artifacts of material life as various as funeral processions, biographical needlework, gravestones, book illustrations, portrait miniatures, and waxwork figures. Conference papers also underscore the continued importance of interdisciplinary approaches for material and visual culture studies by featuring the work of archeologists, art historians, social and cultural historians, curators and literature scholars.

A Friday evening plenary session will mark the twenty-five-year anniversary of the exhibition New England Begins and its accompanying three-volume catalogue. In a roundtable discussion, scholars who worked on New England Begins will reflect on the project and its impact on their scholarship as well as on how the disciplines of material and visual culture have shifted since that landmark exhibition and publication. .

The conference is open to the public.

Schedule and Program

Friday afternoon session in Antiquarian Hall, American Antiquarian Society, 185 Salisbury Street, Worcester

2 p.m.  Welcome from Georgia B. Barnhill, American Antiquarian Society and Martha J. McNamara, University of Maine and Wellesley College, conference co-organizers

Opening Remarks from Ellen Dunlap, President, American Antiquarian Society, and Donald Friary, President, Colonial Society of Massachusetts

2:15   Leora Auslander, University of Chicago, American Exceptionalism: Visual and Material Culture in Colonial and Revolutionary America

3:00  Session One: Geography: Envisioning an Expanding World
          Kevin R. Muller, University of California at Berkeley, Navigation, Vision, and Empire: Eighteenth-Century Engraved Views of Boston in a British Atlantic Context
Martin Brückner, University of Delaware, Moving Pictures, Removing Indians: The Image of the Native American in Eighteenth-Century Maps.
          Patricia Johnston, Salem State College, The Collections of the East India Marine Society: Art as Global Education in the Early Republic.
          Moderator:  Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard University

4:30 Session Two: Economy, Authority and Material Life 
          Emerson W. Baker, Salem State College, The Archaeology of 1690: Material Life on New England’s Northern Frontier.
Joseph F. Cullon, Dartmouth College, The Art of Business and the Business of Art: New England Portraits in Early National New England.
          Kevin D. Murphy, CUNY Graduate Center, Buildings, Landscapes and the Representation of Authority on the Eastern Frontier.
          Moderator: Kevin Sweeney, Amherst College

 6:30 p.m.  Reception and Gala Dinner at the Higgins Armory followed by a round table on New England Begins with David D. Hall, Harvard University; Jonathan Fairbanks, curator emeritus, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Robert St. George, University of Pennsylvania; Wendy Kaplan, Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Abbott Lowell Cummings, Charles F. Montgomery Professor Emeritus of American Decorative Arts, Yale University; and Robert Trent, Independent Scholar Jane Kamensky, Brandeis University, Moderator

Saturday, November 10: Sessions at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Salisbury Laboratories

9:00 a.m. Session Three:  Vision, Memory, and Remembrance
          Steven C. Bullock, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Tokens of Honor and Respect: The Large Funeral in Early New England.
Katherine Rieder, Harvard University, The Remainder of Our Effects We Must Leave Behind:” American Loyalists and the Meaning of Things.
          Aimee E. Newell, National Heritage Museum, Threads of Time: The “Biographical” Needlework of Aging New England Women, 1790-1830.
          Moderator: David Jaffee, CUNY Graduate Center

10:30 a.m.  Break

11:00 a.m.: Session Four: Animate Objects
          Catherine E. Kelly, University of Oklahoma, The Color of Whiteness: Ivory Portrait Miniatures and the Pictorial Representation of Race.
Peter Benes, Dublin Seminar for New England Folk Life, “A barbarous branch of art”: Waxwork Displays as Popular History.  
Ethan W. Lasser, Chipstone Foundation, Boston’s Bombé Furniture and the Maker’s Hand.
          Moderator: Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Yale University

Lunch  12:30p.m.

2:00 p.m.: Session Five:  Object, Text and Context
          Jason D. LaFountain, Harvard University, Shining Example, Borrowed Light: Sun and Glittering Gravestones in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut.
Christopher J. Lukasik, Purdue University, Intermediality and Samuel Hill’s Frontispiece to The Power of Sympathy.
          Katherine Stebbins McCaffrey, Boston University, “Hares haeredem”: The Spectator, as seen through Samuel Dexter’s Spectacles.
          Moderator: Marcy J. Dinius, University of Delaware 

3:30 p.m.:  Session Six:  Summation by Margaretta M. Lovell, University of California at Berkeley and the Mellon Distinguished Scholar at AAS, and Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware

Discussion

Accommodations

A block of rooms is being held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.  Please mention the Colonial Society of Massachusetts when you make your reservation.  The telephone number for reservations is (508) 791-1600.   The rate is $99 plus tax.  The cut-off date is October 29.  Other hotels in Worcester include the new Hilton Garden Inn (508 753-5700), Courtyard by Marriott (508 363-0300), and the Hampton Inn (508 757-0400).

Mail-in Registration Form