John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study

Marina Moskowitz, a Brown 2026 Visiting Senior Fellow, is a recognized scholar in material culture and design history, focusing on the United States during the long nineteenth century. After working as a museum curator, she completed her doctoral degree at Yale and went on to a successful career as a member of the faculty of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, teaching in History, American Studies, and Public Humanities. She is now on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Professor in Design Studies and Faculty Director for the Study of Textiles in the Center for Design and Material Culture. Her research interests in material culture and design encompass the scales of objects, architecture, and landscapes, and intersect with themes of business and marketplace history, as well as histories of everyday life. She has done important work on the material culture of the middle classes and horticultural commerce in the United States. She is exploring what “American-ness” meant to the Revolutionary generation, and what it means today, in particular by examining the legacies of textile production and use in what now constitutes the United States. The place of textiles in the new nation cannot be overstated—developing from the geographies of its raw materials and production to a key role in the new nation’s political economy. Moskowitz proposes to ask the question “What was (and what is) an American textile?”