A hybrid fellow’s forum with Susan Kern, historian and author of The Jeffersons at Shadwell (Yale 2010) from January 19, 2023. Recording available.
About the Presentation
Susan Kern's book project explores landmark preservation projects of the early twentieth century and their lasting influence on historical imagination about early America. Despite changes in restoration philosophy, preservation technology, and interpretive imperatives over the past hundred years, long-ago restoration decisions still affect the stories we want buildings to tell, especially as we interpret them as sites of slavery. Even as later research by scholars in the academy and in museums supplied rigorous evidence about the demographic, power, and spatial dynamics of race and gender, a 1920s vision of the American past endures in the permanent and static nature of early restorations and in the visual culture they generated. At ICJS Kern evaluated the ways that the culture of restoration there and at other sites serves history as we tell it today, with particular attention to how Monticello's restoration committee prioritized historical evidence, chronology, formal design considerations, and materials.
About Susan Kern
Susan Kern is an historian and author who studies early American history and the movements to enshrine that history in museums and historic sites in the twentieth century. She holds a Ph.D. in early American history from William & Mary and an M.A. in architectural history from University of Virginia. She is the author of the award-winning book The Jeffersons at Shadwell (Yale 2010).