 Below is a list of the presenters for the scholarly symposium Narratives of Dress: What Can a Garment Say?, which will be held at Smith College, Northampton, MA on November 1 & 2, 2013. (NOTE: This list may be revised or updated before the event. Check for updates as the symposium date gets closer.)
- Sonnet Stanfill '90
Curator, Contemporary Fashion, Victoria and Albert Museum
Sonnet Stanfill is a curator of 20th century and contemporary fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She has curated shows on Ossie Clark, the major ‘60s fashion designer, and New York Fashion Now, for which she wrote a book of the same name. Other publications include 80s Fashion: From Club to Catwalk and Ballgowns: British Glamour Since 1950. She graduated Smith in 1990 and now lives in England with her husband and two children.
- Marjorie Senechal
Louise Wolfe Kahn Professor Emerita of Math and the History of Science
Marjorie Senechal is the author or editor of twelve books, including Shaping Space; Quasicrystals and Geometry; Long Life to Your Children! a portrait of high Albania; Northampton's Century of Silk and, most recently I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science. She was a founding member of the board of directors of the Washington-based Civilian Research and Development Foundation (now CRDF Global), which promotes and facilitates international scientific cooperation, and was co-chair of the Russian-American Governing Council of its program Basic Research and Higher Education. Marjorie directed the Northampton Silk Project (1998-2003) and is Editor-in-Chief of the international quarterly The Mathematical Intelligencer.
- Nancy Rexford
Independent Scholar, Author
Nancy Rexford is a costume historian, scholar, researcher and consultant with over 30 years experience in non-profit administration and governance. She has held a number of administrative and curatorial positions at Historic Northampton (MA) and Danvers Historical Society (MA) and attended the Williamsburg Seminar for Historic Administration. Her book, Women’s Shoes in Americam 1797-1920, won the Costume Society of America’s award for best costume book of 2000. She is also a musician and writer who has served on the board of the Boston-based writer’s group New Opera and Musical Theater Initiative.
- Diana Baird N’Diaye
Curator and Cultural Specialist, Center for Folklife and Cultural History, Smithsonian Institution
Diana N’Diaye is a curator and cultural heritage policy specialist at the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She has curated programs for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in addition to multiple exhibitions. Her areas of interest span the African and African Diaspora folklife and ethnicity, ethnoaesthetics of dress, craft and design; cultural representation, heritage education, community-based tourism and cultural policy. She received her Ph. D from The Union Institute and University and now lives in Washington, D.C.
- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Author & 300th Anniversary Professor, History, Harvard University
is an historian and is the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. Her work focuses on early American history, women’s history, and material culture. Although she is recognized for her books on early New England, she is not a native of the region. She grew up among the potato farms and sagebrush of eastern Idaho in a town that was on the main highway to Yellowstone National Park. She is the author of numerous books, including Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New England, 1650-1750 (1982) and A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990) which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991 and became the basis of a PBS documentary. In The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Making of an American Myth (2001), she has incorporated museum-based research as well as more traditional archival work. She contributed a now well-known adage to English with her 2007 book Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. Her innovative and widely influential approach to history has been described as a tribute to “the silent work of ordinary people.”
- Marla Miller
Professor, History, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Marla Miller is a professor and director of the Public History Program at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her primary interest is the work of American women before the Industrial Age. She is currently compiling a history of women, work and landscape in Federal Massachusetts, and a short biography of Massachusetts gown maker Rebecca Dickinson. Most recent publications include a biography on Betsy Ross and The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution.
- Edward Maeder
Independent Scholar, former Curator at LACMA, Historic Deerfield, Founding Director, Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto
Edward Maeder is the former director of exhibitions and curator of textiles at Historic Deerfield and, before that, at the L.A. County Museum of Art. He served as the founding director of the Bata Shoe Museum (home of the world's largest collection of shoes) in Toronto, has taught cultural history at the college level, lectured on costumes, textiles, and conservation throughout the world, and written multiple publications. He currently works as an artist making 18th century inspired dresses from household items such as coffee filters, Q-tips, and other types of found paper.
- Lynne Zacek Bassett
Independent Scholar and Textile Historian
Lynne Bassett is an independent scholar specializing in New England’s historic costume and textiles. She served as the curator of collections at Historic Northampton from 1990 to 1995, and has curated a wide-range of exhibitions and has authored or edited numerous books, chapters, papers, and articles, including Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth (2009, University Press of New England). She is one of the founders of the the Massachusetts Quilt Documentation Project.
- Colleen Callahan
Independent Scholar and Textile Historian
Colleen Callahan is a costume and textile historian and curator with experience in conservation. She served as curator of costumes and textiles at the Valentine Richmond History Center for 18 years, managing the museum’s 30,000-piece internationally known collection and curating over twenty art and social history-themed exhibitions. In 2003, she and Newbold Richardson began Costume & Textile Specialists, and together they consult on exhibition, collection management and documentation, conservation, and reproduction clothing projects. She is a lecturer and a contributor to numerous publications on dress and textile history. She graduated from Smith in 1969.
This conference is jointly sponsored by Smith College's Project on Women and Social Change, the Emily Hall Tremaine Symposium Fund through the initiative of Dorothy Tremaine Hildt, class of 1949, the Smith College Lecture Committee, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Smith College Theatre Department, the Smith College History Department, the Smith College American Studies Department and the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute.
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