2013 - Winterthur Program

Winterthur
W
interthur Program
in American MaterialCulture
Class of 2013
Lydia Blackmore grew up in Northern Virginia, where she gained an
appreciation for both George Washington and Washington, D.C. She
attended the College of William and Mary, where she participated in
the National Institute of American History and Democracy Collegiate
Program and gave tours of the historic campus. She received her B.A.
in History with highest honors for her senior honors thesis on the
acquisition and use of silverware in colonial Virginia. After graduation,
she served as the Americana intern for the Curator of Metals at the
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. As an intern, Lydia has worked
with collections and the public at institutions great and small, including
the US Supreme Court, the National Museum of American History,
Gadsby’s Tavern Museum, and the Lee-Fendall House in Alexandria,
Virginia. She hopes to gain experience in every aspect of museum work
while continuing her research interests in silver in southern American
life.
Lydia Blackmore
A native Virginian, Caryne Eskridge calls Alexandria home. Her
family’s countless trips to museums, historic houses, and antique shops
encouraged her to develop an interest in history, architecture, and objects
early in life. She received her B.A. in History in 2010 from the College
of William and Mary, where she was pleased to discover the field of
material culture. Her first foray into the field was an internship with the
Assistant Curator of Historic Interiors at Colonial Williamsburg. In 2010,
she participated in the Historic Deerfield Summer Fellowship Program,
where she studied the mid-eighteenth century Thomas Williams House
in Deerfield, MA. In 2011, before coming to Winterthur, she completed
an internship with a prominent antiques dealer in Alexandria. During
her time at Winterthur, she hopes to explore everything that she possibly
can. In her spare time, Caryne enjoys being outdoors, reading design
blogs, and listening to music.
Caryne Eskridge
Rebecca Hathaway is from Massachusetts and has an insatiable curiosity
for objects. Having studied art history, philosophy, and American studies
at Framingham State College, she has pursued work at institutions
that emphasize connections between people and things: in Boston at
the Museum of Fine Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art, and Trinity
Church; in Worcester, at the Higgins Armory Museum; and, in New York
City, at a private American Art gallery. Rebecca comes to Winterthur
following a round-the-world journey that expanded her visual knowledge
and broadened her perspective on material culture via stays in Prague, St.
Petersburg, Beijing, and Yogyakarta, among others. She sees Winterthur
as the next big adventure in her lifelong entanglement with objects.
Rebecca Hathaway
A Chicago native of Mexican, Spanish, Portuguese, and Jewish decent,
Dalila Huerta became fascinated by cultural exchange. After moving to
Indiana’s Amish Country, working as a migrant parent educator, and
studying abroad in Brittany, France, during her secondary school years,
she observed the conflicts of differing classes and cultures. In 2009, she
graduated with honors from Marian University-Indianapolis with a
B.A. in History and minors in Global Studies and Peace and Justice
Studies. She has studied nineteenth-century consumerism and religious
oppositions, globalism’s impact on border life, oral histories of Chicago
immigrants, Jewish toleration and migration in Medieval Iberia, and the
role and impact of civil religion on American culture. Her fellowship
with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in NYC fueled
her interest in the public humanities, and her work as founder and
editor-in-chief of the Marian Undergraduate Journal of History and
Social Sciences revealed the necessity of interdisciplinary scholarship.
At Winterthur, she hopes to connect her interests in material culture,
intellectual history, religious practice, and family life. In her spare time,
Dalila enjoys learning new languages, reading nineteenth-century
French and Russian literature, writing poetry and creative nonfiction,
practicing yoga, painting with oils, collecting copies of American and
European lithograph prints, and teaching children about the intricacies
of the past.
Dalila Huerta
A native Pennsylvanian, Joseph H. Larnerd earned a B.A. in History
(2006) and a M.A. in Art History (2011) at Temple University, in
Philadelphia. While a graduate student, he taught classes on American
art and pursued an abiding interest in extra-canonical American
artifacts. Joseph researched James Hampton’s monumental altar The
Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General
Assembly as a 2009 Douglass Foundation Fellow at the Smithsonian
American Art Museum. His thesis “Foreboding Foil: The Throne’s
Militant Materiality” closely examines the assemblage’s material and
iconographic atomic angst. Joseph spent the summer of 2010 as a Frank
L. Horton Fellow at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts,
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. That experience cemented his interest
in stuff and led him to Winterthur.
Growing up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Tori Pyle experienced
history through a county-wide sense of “heritage.” Her unconscious
interest in people’s things and what they reveal grew during her first
class at Millersville University. Seeing artifacts from Port Royal, Jamaica,
uncovered her passion for objects. A subsequent archaeological field
school in Bermuda and internship at the National Museum of Bermuda
threw her into the Atlantic World of the eighteenth century. After
graduating from Millersville University with a Bachelor’s in History
and a minor in Archaeology, Tori explored another branch of the field
and became more involved in the 1719 Hans Herr House and Museum
where she had volunteered as a tour guide and costumed interpreter.
Additionally, she organized and wrote an exhibit about the Anabaptist
tradition of embroidering hand towels. At Winterthur, she plans to
hone this interest in museum exhibitions to share the heritage that she
learned as a child. In addition she intends to expand her knowledge of
people and their possessions in the context of the eighteenth century
Anglo-Atlantic World.
Victoria Pyle
Kate Swisher
Joseph Larnerd
A native of southern New Jersey, Nina Ranalli began a lifelong goal of
visiting all of the presidential homesteads at the age of 15. She earned
her Bachelor’s degree in Social Studies from Harvard University, where
she studied commemoration in post-revolutionary societies. During her
undergraduate career, Nina completed research on the memorialization
of Ireland’s revolutionary heroes and on the stories of the American
Revolution that emerged from and are commemorated in Boston.
She also completed an internship in the education department of the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Additionally, she conducted archival
research that aided preservationists in restoring the suite that Franklin
Roosevelt lived in during his time at Harvard. Upon completing her
degree, Nina returned to southern New Jersey for a year and worked at
two small museums: Historic Cold Spring Village, a nineteenth-century
living history museum; and Naval Air Station Wildwood Aviation
Museum, which is housed in a WWII aircraft hangar. During her time
at Winterthur, Nina looks forward to learning more about life in early
America and exploring what our current commemorative practices can
teach us about American culture.
Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Kate first became acquainted with
material culture in high school as a docent at her local historical society,
giving tours in pioneer costume of a nineteenth-century log house and
its furnishings. While earning a B.A. in French with minors in History
and English from Swarthmore College, she explored her fascination
with artifacts by handling historical documents as a student worker at
the Friends Historical Library and as a Special Collections intern at the
Newberry Library in Chicago. She also learned more about interpreting
objects for the public through an internship in Visitor Services at
the Chicago History Museum and a summer fellowship at Historic
Deerfield. After graduating in 2009, she took a detour from the museum
world to work on a project cataloging French Revolutionary pamphlets
at the Newberry Library; however, she kept one foot in interpretation by
moonlighting as a guide at the historic home of Charles Gates Dawes
in Evanston, Illinois. Now that she is studying objects full-time at
Winterthur, Kate looks forward to getting lost in the Museum, exploring
Delaware, and learning about Victorian and twentieth-century history
and culture, among many other things.
Nina Ranalli
Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, Class of 201
2013