History Should Make You Uncomfortable: Symposium Recap
Hope Elizabeth Gillespie
Citation: Gillespie, Hope Elizabeth. “History Should Make You Uncomfortable: Symposium Recap” The Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture, March 10, 2023.
On March 4th, CMSMC hosted their 5th symposium which revisited the inaugural symposium topic, History Should Make You Uncomfortable. In the opening remarks, Creative Director Sydney Sheehan expressed, “By asserting that History Should Make You Uncomfortable, we are insisting that there is more to the story you think you know. This theme also asks scholars, and the public alike, not just to approach the subject with a critical eye, but to think about why these uncomfortable histories that we know to exist have not breached mainstream understandings of the world. It calls into question authority and visibility in the historical record and asks learners to question why it is we learn the things we do? By re-centering these marginalized, and often uncomfortable histories, our capacity to learn grows exponentially not just as individuals but societally.” In returning to this theme, the goal was to see how much we as a discipline have embraced those concepts and broken new ground in the quest for a more authentic historiography.
The first presenter was Caroline Marcyes, a second-year student in the Material Culture and Public Humanities MA program at Virginia Tech. Her areas of focus include museum administration, community outreach programming, and museum accessibility. Her presentation, “The Origin of The World: An Analysis of the Female Nude through Gustave Courbet’s [In]famous Masterpiece” was a case study of the 1866 painting. Caroline used the painting as an example in order to understand what makes female nudity in art such a controversial topic, and how women are treated in art and by artists from the 19th century to modern day.
The second presenter was Dorian Cole, a Lois F. McNeil Fellow with the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. They graduated Summa cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley in 2022 with a B.A. in history and English. Their current research interests include the material history of popular culture and museum visitor studies. Their presentation, “Play Things: Teaching Systemic Prejudice through Children's Toys,” a case study of two objects from the Winterthur Museum: an iron puppet of a black man and a cloth topsy-turvy doll. Using these two toys as an example, they discussed the way toys are used to normalize systemic racism in the minds of children, which is not reflected in the way these objects are presented in the museums.
The final presenter was Lyric Lott, who holds an MPhil in Early Modern History from the University of Cambridge and is a current fellow in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. In her studies, she researches “difficult objects,” or pieces of material culture that present problematic histories or provenances. Her presentation, “Who Are Museums For?: Klan Robes and the Politics of Discomfort in the Exhibit Space,” discussed the utility of discomfort as a tool of education and the problems it can create within exhibit spaces. Focusing on the display of Ku Klux Klan robes, this presentation explored the balancing act museums must make between the education of the public and the stewardship of traumatizing materials.
In lieu of having a keynote speaker, we invited two of our original History Should Make You Uncomfortable presenters, Christine Staton and Logan Ward, for a retrospective on how the topic has changed in the last few years. Christine Staton has an MA in art history from Syracuse University with a focus on Italian early modern art history. As a master’s scholar, Christine studies the revival of Egyptian antiquities in late sixteenth-century Rome. She now teaches art history at Rowan University. While a master’s student, Christine spoke at the inaugural symposium of CMSMC and delivered a paper entitled, “Curating Heritage Value: the Palazzo Strozzi and Florence.” This paper explored the foundation of the Palazzo Strozzi Museum in Florence, Italy, during the Fascist era in Italy and the early years of the Second World War. Although this history is widely available to the interested reader, the public information that the museum provides ignores it entirely. Christine’s paper considered the discomfort that the museum clearly felt with its own history and how it contributed to the creation of a specifically Italian cultural heritage.
Logan Ward is a Ph.D. student in art history focusing on Korean art at the University of Kansas. His research interests include Korean art collections in the United States, and modern-contemporary art and visual culture in/from both North and South Korea with emphases on post coloniality and semiotics. Ward teaches modern Korean art and culture at KU, and he has been an editor for CMSMC since 2021. They delivered their first paper titled “Double Orientalized Korea,” at History Should Make You Uncomfortable in 2020, which served as a basis for their first M.A. thesis titled “Colonial Connections: Interpreting and Representing Korea through Art and Material Culture at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1914 – 1945),” at the Ohio State University.
Following the retrospective, all of our panelists participated in a Q&A with CMSMC Editor-in-Chief, Hope Elizabeth Gillespie, where they discussed the ideas of unnecessary discomfort, the responsibility of scholars in discussing uncomfortable topics, and whether or not the word should is appropriate, semantically, for the prompt. A full video of the symposium is available on our website and YouTube channel.
We will continue to explore the History Should Make You Uncomfortable theme with an upcoming round of publications. CMSMC has traditionally published biweekly during the academic year, but we are now moving towards a more traditional journal style with more concentrated publication. We hope to publish special issues around upcoming symposium topics and our first issue will center around the theme of History Should Make You Uncomfortable. Submission are due by June 1 and a copy of the CFP is available on our website.
We are grateful for the symposium’s insightful dialogue and look forward to continuing the conversation on all things material culture. Thank you to all who attended for your continued support! Special thanks to our symposium committee: Peri Buch, Hope Gillespie, Sarah Henzlik, Mary Manfredi, Maille Radford, Sydney Sheehan, MaryKate Smolenski, Christine Staton, and Reb Xu.