About
BIO & BACKGROUND
Dr. Cynthia E. McGinnis Riddle Chin is a material culture historian specializing in the dress textiles of Anglo-America & eighteenth-century Europe.
She explores the intersections and ecologies of race, otherness, global exchange, emotion, memory, replicated experience, the body/wearing -- and how human dignity can be preserved through new ways of looking at objects.
Together with Philippe Halbert (Yale University), she founded and leads Materializing Race, a virtual community committed to fostering nuanced interpretations and meaningful dialogue on historical constructions of race and their legacies. Through a series of virtual “unconferences," scholarship on the intersections of identity and material culture in #VastEarlyAmerica is discussed and shared. Follow Materializing Race on Twitter: @material_race.
Her interests include the material culture historian as biographer and genealogist, and how personal genealogy and positionality affects the interpretation of objects, visual languages, and their temporalities.
Cynthia is currently a Research Fellow at the Washington Library in Mount Vernon, Virginia.
Robe á l'anglais, detail
Date:1780–85
Cultures: China for the European market*
Medium: Silk
Credit Line: Gift of heirs of Emily Kearny Rodgers Cowenhoven, 1970
Accession Number:1970.87a, b
Public Domain
*This object description has been revised for accuracy.