Material Culture and Museums

Dr. Carter puts what she learned in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware, at Harvard, and from Harvard's eighteenth-century Artemas Ward House Museum into practice. At the Chipstone Foundation she develops museum exhibitions, research initiatives and pedagogical projects centered around material culture and museums. She is currently team teaching the General Education course US and the World 30: Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History with Laurel Ulrich.

In 2010-2011, she served as the project manager for the Tangible Things project, a major material culture exhibition at Harvard. Read about the exhibition in this front-page Boston Globe story, or in an exhibition review published in the Journal of American History. Download the iTunes album to "tour" the exhibit.  A co-authored book on the exhibition will be published in 2014 by Oxford University Press. 

In the summer of 2012, Dr. Carter worked on a centennial history project for the Boston Children's Museum, the nation's second oldest children's museum (1913-2013). 

She is co-editor, with Ellery Foutch, of the Object Lessons column for Common-Place and is collaborating with Ivan Gaskell on an edited collection on History and Material Culture.