2025

Steven Baltsas, Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, University of Delaware

Alexander Roux and his brother Frédéric’s mid-19th century transnational furniture enterprise, operating between New York and Paris, that catered to cosmopolitan customers via networks of manufactories, retailers, and display rooms.

Sarah Egan, Bard Graduate Center

Illinois education advocate Clara Kern Bayliss (1848–1948), who authored early 1900s children’s books about Lolami, a fictional “Little Cliff Dweller” in Arizona, and the books’ archaeological and historical sources and impact.

 

2024

Sophia Kamps, Queen’s University in Ontario

A survey of 1,200 Gilded Age stained-glass windows at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Diane Dias De Fazio, Kent State University

How the forgotten c. 1900 inventors of the ubiquitous, oft-unheralded escalator changed the way people experienced and used department stores and other public spaces.

Deena Ecker, CUNY Graduate Center

Late Victorian streetscapes and culture (popular, consumer, and sexual) through the lens of prostitution—how did these maligned women maintain some agency?

Amanda Westbrook Brennan, CUNY Graduate Center

Black women activists, writers, and club women who elevated communities while defying stereotypes.

 

2023

Juliana Cirillo, NYU

Aspects of ethnicity and class as revealed in 19th-century maids’ uniforms.

Audrey Steinkamp, Yale University

The under-appreciated artist Maria Richards Oakey Dewing (1845–1927).

Julia Carabatsos, Columbia University

Visual and material strategies that Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and her editorial staff employed in The Woman’s Era, an 1890s periodical primarily written by and for Black women.

 

2022

Hannah Morand, University of Toronto

A 120-foot-long panoramic painting of a U.S. Army victory at Gettysburg, shown in the 1880s at venues including a freestanding circular building near Brooklyn’s City Hall.

Anna Lea, University of Vienna

Caricatures and interpretations of Chinese people and Chinese Americans in Tin Pan Alley sheet music and compositions.

Madeline Porsella, Bard Graduate Center

Discoveries about a Vanderbilt heiress cladding herself in a gilt-trimmed dress embroidered with lightning bolts and illuminated by battery-powered light bulbs.

 

2021

Margaret Simons, Parsons School of Design/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Enigmatic photographer Alice Austen (1866–1952).

Alexis Fair, Parsons

How fashions in novel and film versions of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence reveal identity, character, cultural ideologies, and women’s struggles for independence.

Lara Damabi, NYU

How late-19th-century societal changes, such as evolving gender relations, growing interest in sport and exercise, and technological advancements, were reflected through ice skating and fashion.

 

2020

Canceled due to COVID-19 pandemic.

 

2019

Christine Garnier, Harvard University

Symbolism in a mining tycoon’s Tiffany silver dinnerware.

Ayaka Sano, NYU

Connections between men’s detachable shirt collars and anti-Chinese bigotry.

Elizabeth Muir, New School

New York brothel furniture.