Teaching in the Material World

Mariah Gruner (GRS), a doctoral student in BU’s American & New England Studies Program, with a 19th-century quilt, designed for a child’s cradle, that she studied at Historic New England in Haverhill, Mass. The quilt’s central star features a handwritten stanza, now faded, from an abolitionist poem, imploring a mother to think of enslaved mothers and children when holding her own child.

ALL HISTORIANS READ BOOKS, of course. But some of them also read quilts, or tools, or chairs.

“Objects can be texts, and their meaning can be translated,” explains William D. Moore, director of BU’s American & New England Studies Program (AMNESP) and a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of material culture—the formal name for “reading” the objects that humans make.

Moore’s research explores the meaning of the 20th-century fascination with Shaker furniture; graduate students in material culture at AMNESP are studying a range of items, from carved powder horns to needlework by women in the abolitionist movement. And now, thanks to an anonymous donor to CAS, a $1.7 million endowment will support a postdoctoral fellowship in American material culture.

Moore hopes to recruit the first fellow to begin a two-year term in the fall of 2020—exactly 50 years after AMNESP was cofounded by Abbott Lowell Cummings, for whom the fellowship is named. Cummings, a renowned architectural historian who taught at BU and Yale, was the longtime director of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now known as Historic New England.

“The American & New England Studies Program is a vital part of CAS, and we are deeply grateful for this generous gift,” says Stan Sclaroff, CAS dean. “Providing support for a postdoctoral fellow will further the program’s mission to educate leading curators, scholars, and researchers in American material culture.”

Indeed, graduates of this interdisciplinary program have gone on to teach and work in museums and other nonprofit institutions. Among them: Ned Cooke (GRS’84), a distinguished professor of American decorative arts at Yale; Elizabeth Kornhauser (CAS’72, GRS’88), curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Tom Denenberg (GRS’95,’02), director of the Shelburne Museum.

The fellowship will enable the program “to bring in someone who’s just earned their PhD and is on the cutting edge of material culture scholarship,” Moore says. Supported by income from the fellowship fund, fellows will teach just one undergraduate course and one upper-level seminar, allowing ample time to conduct research and develop their dissertations into a book. And at the end of the two years, he says, they’ll move on to other institutions, using the work they’ve done here to continue AMNESP’s influence on the evolution of material culture scholarship.

“Forty years ago, material culture was synonymous with decorative arts,” Moore says. While some still specialize in that area, he notes, others are “pushing the envelope,” like that student who’s studying powder horns, along with scrimshaw. “She’s using those forms to talk about the construction of masculinity.”

That’s the kind of fresh thinking he believes the Abbott Lowell Cummings Fellowship will encourage.

“We’re helping promising young scholars, and we’re making sure that the best scholarship gets turned into books and distributed nationally,” Moore says. “We’re building the pipeline—and then they’re being sent out into the world, transforming the field.”