#materializingrace
about dr cynthia chin kirk
BIO & BACKGROUND
ABOUT
Dr Cynthia Chin Kirk (Dr. Cynthia E. Chin, Dr. Cynthia McGinnis Riddle Chin) is an art and material culture historian of #VastEarlyAmerica and Britain in the eighteenth century, specializing in dress, textiles, identity, and collecting.
She is a researcher at the University of Glasgow and the co-founder of Materializing Race.
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 “un-conferences," scholarship on the intersections of identity and material culture in #VastEarlyAmerica is discussed and shared. Follow Materializing Race on on Instagram: materializingrace, and on Twitter: @material_race.
MATERIALIZING RACE
affliations & Fellowships
As a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow Cynthia explores #VastEarlyAmerica, British, and European dress, textiles, and art, 1600-1830 and how collections and museum acquisitions strategies shaped understandings of early America.
She was a 2020-21 Research Fellow at the Washington Library in Mount Vernon, Virginia, and earned her doctorate in early American material culture from Georgetown University in 2019.
The Female Combatants, or Who Shall?
Print, etching and engraving, hand-colored
Possibly London, 1776
Yale University
Lewis Walpole Library
966.12.3.215
Printed Linen Textile
Philadelphia, PA
Walters & Bedwell
Made possibly by enslaved labor
Winterthur Museum
1958.0605.001