Tuesday, September 8th 5:30 PM on Zoom
Local History Guild: The World of Textiles in the 1800s
Tuesday, September 8th 5:30 PM on Zoom
Local History Guild is the NBWM’s quarterly Zoom program, an informal discussion about art, history, science and culture related to the museum’s mission, collection, and the surrounding region. This September, NBWM invites a group of historians and art historians to share their research on textiles in the nineteenth-century northeast. In this edition of the program, we will be joined by Madelyn Shaw, former curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the Smithsonian; Emily Whitted, PhD candidate at UMass Amherst; and Mariah Kupfner, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Public Heritage at Penn State Harrisburg.
Madelyn Shaw is a curator and author specializing in the exploration of American culture and history, and its international connections, through textiles and dress. She has held curatorial and administrative positions at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; New Bedford Whaling Museum; The Textile Museum, Washington DC; and the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC. She has curated more than 50 exhibitions, and published extensively in both academic and popular venues, print, online, and blog posts, on topics related to the development of the American textile and fashion industries, the China Trade, Slave Cloth, and Aviation clothing and popular culture, among others. Her most recent book, co-authored with Australian historian Trish FitzSimons, is titled Fleeced: Unraveling the History of Wool and War (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Emily Whitted is a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst focusing on early American material culture, textile history, and labor history. Her work has been funded by fellowships at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Winterthur Museum, the American Philosophical Society, and the Decorative Arts Trust. She has recently guest curated American Girlhood: Needlework, Memory, and the Making of a Nation, which is on view at the Webb Deane Stevens Museum through December 2026. Since 2025, she has also served as the Richard W. Burkhardt Fellow in History, Science, and Art at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Emily also holds a M.A. degree in American Material Culture from the Winterthur Program at the University of Delaware.
Mariah Kupfner is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Public Heritage at Penn State Harrisburg. She holds a Ph.D. in American & New England Studies from Boston University. Her book Crafting Womanhood: Needlework, Gender, and Politics in the United States, 1810-1920 will be published November 10, 2026 by the University of Delaware Press in their Material Culture Perspectives series. This research examines core themes of the developing women’s movement in the United States from 1820 to 1920—the abolition of slavery, women’s property ownership, education, political identity, and the franchise—through the lens of decorative needlework. Her research recaptures the significant contributions that needleworkers made to women’s cultural and political activism and considers gender itself as a crafted form. Her work has also appeared in the Winterthur Portfolio and the Material Culture Review and in public-facing venues like Nursing Clio (also under the name "Mariah Gruner"). Previously, Kupfner worked as a postdoctoral curatorial fellow at Historic New England and as a program coordinator for the Boston University Public Humanities Undergraduate Fellowship Program. She has worked in public humanities, public history, and the museum field and is deeply committed to publicly engaged scholarship.
