Katie’s talk is titled From Seed to Sack: Enslaved Labor and Textile Production and is a portion of a chapter from her dissertation, Fashioning Slavery: Slaves and Clothing in the U.S. South, 1830-1865. She is currently finishing her PhD in history at Rice, where she has taught material culture and women’s history courses and has just started a position as Visiting Assistant Editor for the Journal of Southern History, which is edited at Rice.
Katie has also served as the Jameson Fellow at Bayou Bend and as curatorial intern at Winterthur Museum, where she worked directly under textiles curator Linda Eaton. With Linda and Dr. Marla Miller, Katie co-curated the exhibit “Betsy Ross: The Life behind the Legend” for Winterthur.
Research for her dissertation was partially funded by the Costume
Society of America’s Stella Blum Research Grant and a report from that research was published in their 2012 issue of Dress. Although she doesn’t weave or spin, Katie grew up in a house full of fabric wearing home-sewn dresses and has been an avid knitter for over ten years.
Image credit: Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Beaufort, South Carolina. , ca. 1862. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. LC-B8171-152-A.