Marina Moskowitz

Education
Ph.D. American Studies, Yale University

Research Interests
American Cultural History; History of Textiles and Design; History of Business and Technology; Material Culture, Built Environment, and Cultural Landscapes

Biography
I have long had an interest in the “stuff” of human life. Early in my career I worked in curatorial roles in history museums, using artifacts to engage communities with their local histories. After receiving my Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University, working on the role of material culture in building national communities of American consumers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I moved to Scotland to take up a post in History and American Studies at the University of Glasgow, giving me new perspectives on my research.

At Glasgow I taught across various period and subfields of American history, as well as teaching material culture and public humanities to graduate students, and advising a cohort of wonderful doctoral students across a range of topics in political and cultural history, and especially material culture, including the history of textiles. I also carried out a varied administrative portfolio, with responsibilities for teaching, research, and graduate student professional development at both department and college level.

Publications
Co-Editor, Textile History, The Journal of the Pasold Research Fund, 2016–22.

“Back Yards and Beyond: Landscapes and History,” in History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, 2d ed., edited by Karen Harvey, 67–84 (London: Routledge, 2017).

Co-Investigator, Network Grant for “Knitting in the Round: Hand-Knitted Textiles and the Economies of Craft in Scotland,” Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2014–16.

“‘Aren’t We All?’: Aspiration, Acquisition, and the American Middle Class,” in The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History, edited by A. Ricardo López and Barbara Weinstein, 75–86 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

Workshop Grant for “Hand-Knitted Textiles and the Economies of Craft in Scotland,” Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2011–12.

Testimonial Advertising and the American Marketplace: Emulation, Identity, Community, edited with Marlis Schweitzer, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

“Calendars and Clocks: Cycles of Horticultural Commerce in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality, and Culture, edited by Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, and Richard Wilk, 115–28 (Oxford: Berg, 2009).

Cultures of Commerce: Representations and American Business Culture, 1877–1960, edited with Elspeth H. Brown and Catherine Gudis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 

Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004; paperback, 2008).

Teaching
DS 264/764: Dimensions of Material Culture
DS 355: History of Fashion, 1400–Present
DS 430: History of Textiles