Publications & Talks
Articles
Early Southern Decorative Arts, Winston Salem, NC
“The Follet Sampler at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts,” The Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust, (Feb 1, 2022)
Book & Digital Project Reviews
Review of Edward Town and Angela McShane, eds. Marking Time: Objects, People, and their Lives, 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). H-Material Culture (July 2021)
Review of James P. Ambuske, Randi Flaherty, Loren Moulds, Cecilia Brown, Kate Boudouris, Scottish Court of Sessions Digital Archive Project, The University of Virginia Law Library, https://scos.law.virginia.edu/scos/ (accessed April 4, 2021). History: The Journal of the Historical Association (May 2021)
Review of Bronwen Everill, Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). Reviews in History (April 2021)
Review of Christine Walker, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). H-Nationalism (December 2020)
Review of Kate Retford, The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Reviews in History (February 2018)
Review of Ben Marsh, Unravelled Dreams: Silk and the Atlantic World 1500-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Agricultural History, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Summer 2021), pp. 542-545.
Digital Humanities Essays
“You Just Had to Be There? Thoughts on Transcription, Inventories, and Materiality in Understanding Carlton House.” Georgian Papers Programme Blog, Royal Collection Trust (February 4, 2020)
“Learning to Stretch the Digital Vellum: Digital Literacy and the Production of Humanist Scholarship.” Uncommon Sense – The Blog, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, William & Mary (October 11, 2018)
Lectures & Talks
“To Brighten Every Painful Hour”: The Follet Family Sampler. The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. July 2021.
At the time of death, a person disappears from view. Someone, or in the case of the Follet Family Sampler, two people – Mary and Ann Follet – who had been so present in the lives of those around them, cease to share their physical space. Embodied engagement with material objects offers one way to cope with this physical and emotional loss. Through processes like threading silk through the eye of a needle and repetitiously, almost meditatively, stitching permanent marks into linen, or sitting down at an engraver’s bench to carefully slide a burin over a smooth silver disk to carve out the names, ages, and death dates of the deceased, physically engaging with an object can aid in the processing of grief, pain, loss, and in the creation of memory. Material culture thus mediates our relationship(s) with life, death, and the dead themselves. Objects evoke the presence of a person and, in this process of evocation, they become memory palaces that facilitate remembering. This talk examines the Follet Family Sampler to explore the three material stages present in this object. It offers one possible interpretation of the layers of meaning inherent within this piece.
