10:10 a.m., Nov. 19, 2008----The University of Delaware was well represented at the 2008 MESDA (The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts) Conference on Early American Culture, held last month in Winston-Salem, N.C.

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“There was a stunning number of presenters with UD connections,” according to Katherine (Kasey) Grier, director of the University of Delaware's Museum Studies Program and professor of history.

Of the approximately 17 presenters, a dozen were affiliated with UD as faculty, alumni or current graduate students, Grier said. Add to that, the number of other scholars who have been research fellows at Winterthur Museum and Country Estate and the number becomes even larger, an indication of the influence of the two institutions in the field of American material culture, she said.

“This participation in MESDA reflects the quality of work and research being carried out at UD through its art history department and its Winterthur Program in Early American Culture,” Grier said. She also is a UD alumna who received her doctorate from the UD history department's History of American Civilization program and now serves as its director.

MESDA is a forum for new research in the field of early American decorative arts and material culture. The conference used to focus on southern material culture, Grier said, but now encompasses all early American material culture. “This has broadened the scope and importance of the conference, and encourages comparisons between various regions of early America, she said.

MESDA also offers an opportunity for not only established scholars to present their research, but for younger scholars as well, Grier said. The conference ended with study tours and behind the scenes visits to MESDA and Old Salem collections and to private collections and Prestwould plantation.

Conference topics ranged from punch bowls and South Carolina
silk to the material culture of slavery and freedom.
The keynote speaker was alumnus Edward S. Cooke Jr., Charles Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts at Yale University, who received his master's degree from UD's Winterthur Program in Early American Culture in 1979. His topic was “ 'We are some of us English gentlemen': The Creation of a
Boston Aristocracy,” and Cooke also served as moderator of the Furniture Form, Function and Ideas session.

Grier led a discussion and made comments as moderator of the “Meaning In Objects” session.

Other UD affiliates and their topics were:

• Zara Anishanslin Bernhardt, a graduate student in history in UD's Center for Material Culture Studies, spoke on “Ornamented in a Serpentine Manner with Flowers: The Shifting Cultural Landscapes Embodied in Liza Lucas Pinckney's South Carolina Silk”;
• Nicole Belolan, a graduate student in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, spoke on “The Close Stool: A Toilet for a Society of Propriety”;
• Dana Ellen Byrd, an alumna of UD's Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and now with Yale University, spoke on “Motive Power, Punkahs and Performance in the Antebellum South”;
• Sarah Neale Fayen, an alumna of UD's Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and now at the Chipstone Foundation, spoke on “The Chinese Scholar Pattern: Style, Merchant Identify and the English Imagination in Late 17th-Century Tin-Glazed Earthenware”;
• Eric Gollannek, who just completed his doctorate in art history and is now on the faculty of Ferris State University, spoke on “Drinking Around the Atlantic Rim: The Sensory Worlds of the Punch Bowl in 18th-Century America”;
• Anna Marley, a UD graduate student in art history, spoke on “The Imperial Picturesque in the Charleston Domestic Interior: Thomas Coram's Representations of the Lowcountry Plantation Landscape”;
• Louis Nelson, a graduate of UD's Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and now at the University of Virginia, spoke on “The Architectures of Freedom”;
• Jennifer Van Horn, an alumna a Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and now at the University of Virginia, spoke on “ 'Dressing Tables': Counterfeit and Concealment in Early Southern Dressing Furniture”; and
• Nicholas Vincent, an alumnus of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, now with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, spoke on “Pier Tables and their Role in Culture of Sociability and Competition.”

Article by Sue Moncure