Dr Cynthia Chin Kirk (Dr. Cynthia E. Chin/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.

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As a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow, Cynthia explores dress, textiles, and art, 1600-1830 and how collections and museum acquisitions strategies shaped understandings of early America.

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As a maker and advocate of replication-as-research, she incorporates embodied methods of knowledge in her academic practice, focusing on eighteenth-century women's dress in North America, Britain, France -– and Scottish kilts and kilt-making. She is currently replicating a gown owned by Martha Washington that was mended and cared for by seamstresses enslaved at Mount Vernon.

 

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.

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Together with Philippe Halbert (PhD, Yale University), she co-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 are discussed and shared.

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Materializing Race has been generously supported by the Society of Winterthur Fellows and the University of Glasgow.

 

Follow Materializing Race on on Instagram: materializingrace, and on Twitter: @material_race.