Instructors
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is the author of 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. Her most recent book is Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007). Her major fields of interest are early American social history, women’s history, and material culture.
Sarah Carter
Sarah Anne Carter is the Curator and Director of Research of the Chipstone Foundation, a Milwaukee-based organization devoted to the study of material culture and known for its innovative museum exhibitions. She has taught as a lecturer at Harvard in the History and Literature program and in the History Department. Her book, Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Made Sense of the Material World is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Her work explores the varied meanings of material things, museum practice, and American social and cultural history.
Ivan Gaskell
Ivan Gaskell is Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies at the Bard Graduate Center. His work on material culture addresses intersections among history, art history, anthropology, and philosophy. His principal scholarly concern is to mobilize non-written traces of the past to illuminate aspects of the lives of human actors that would otherwise remain obscure. As well as writing individual historical case studies on topics ranging from seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, to Roman baroque sculpture, Native American baskets, and Congo textiles, Gaskell works on the philosophical plane of second order questioning. While on the faculty at Cambridge University, he collaborated with the late Salim Kemal to edit a ten book series of multi-author volumes, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts. He has also organized numerous experimental exhibitions at Harvard University, where he taught and curated between 1991 and 2011. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of eleven books, and have contributed to numerous journals and edited volumes in history, art history, and philosophy.
Sara Schechner
Sara Schechner, Ph.D. is the David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University. She is a historian of science, specializing in material culture and the history of astronomy. At Harvard, she is a member of the History of Science Department and has been on the faculty of the Museum Studies program. She brings over thirty years of museum and academic experience to the Harvard community.
Teaching Staff
Christopher Allison is a doctoral student, also in the History of American Civilization (now American Studies) at Harvard. His dissertation research is on American Protestant relic culture between the Revolutionary era and the Civil War, and looks at things such as the bones of famous preachers, vials of hair, fragments of clothing, and other body-related remnants of America’s religious past. His other interests are in the history of American reform, especially antislavery. He also taught for Prof. Ulrich and Dr. Sarah Carter’s on-campus iteration of Tangible Things, and is excited to be back.
John Bell is a doctoral candidate in Harvard's American Studies program. His dissertation explores the relationship between race, gender, and higher education in mid-nineteenth-century America. He served as Head Teaching Fellow for the fall 2013 iteration of Tangible Things and is delighted to return.
Han Hsien Liew is a doctoral student in History and Middle Eastern Studies. He is currently working on a dissertation on medieval Islamic political thought as expressed in different genres of Islamic writings between the 11th and 13th century. He taught for Prof. Ulrich and Dr. Sara Schechner's on-campus iteration of Tangible Things in Spring 2015, and is very much looking forward to be part of the team again.
Max Perry Mueller completed his PhD in the Study of Religion at Harvard (with Professor Ulrich serving as co-chair of the dissertation committee) in 2015. In his research, Mueller studies how religious ways of knowing in America have served to challenge as well as to reaffirm the history of valuing some American lives over others, and how such theologically-based human valuations have been encoded not only in religious doctrine, but also in American politics, law, in media, and onto flesh and bone bodies of Americans--especially in relation to categories of racial and gendered division. Last year he was a visiting lecturer at Mount Holyoke College. And starting this fall, he will be a postdoctoral fellow in Amherst College's Center for Humanistic Inquiry.
Zachary Davis works at HarvardX where he focuses on building open online courses in the humanities. Previously at the metaLAB (at) Harvard and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Zachary is a graduate of Brigham Young University, where he majored in International Relations and Philosophy. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.