Lydia Blackmore

Rebecca Hathaway

Dalila Huerta

Winterthur ProgramWinterthur ProgramW interthur Program interthur Program in American MaterialCulture in American MaterialCulture

Class of 2013

Caryne Eskridge

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.

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 fi eld of material culture. Her fi rst foray into the fi eld was an internship with the Assistant Curator of Historic Interiors at Colonial Williamsburg. In 2010, she participated in the Historic Deerfi eld Summer Fellowship Program, where she studied the mid-eighteenth century Th omas Williams House in Deerfi eld, 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.

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 confl icts of diff ering 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 nonfi ction, practicing yoga, painting with oils, collecting copies of American and European lithograph prints, and teaching children about the intricacies of the past.

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.

Joseph Larnerd

Victoria Pyle

Kate Swisher

Nina Ranalli

Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, Class of 2013Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, Class of 2013Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, Class of 201

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 Th e Th rone of the Th ird Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly as a 2009 Douglass Foundation Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His thesis “Foreboding Foil: Th e Th rone’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. Th at experience cemented his interest in stuff and led him to Winterthur.

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 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 fi rst class at Millersville University. Seeing artifacts from Port Royal, Jamaica, uncovered her passion for objects. A subsequent archaeological fi eld 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 fi eld 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.

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Kate fi rst 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 Deerfi eld. 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.