Slavery Studies | Design History:
The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize Symposium
with Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton), Christian Crouch (BGC), Jerome Ellis (Artist), Edward Jones-Imhotep (University of Toronto), Robin McDowell (Bates College), Seth Rockman (Brown University), Hampton Smith (University of Arkansas), and Jonathan Michael Square (Parsons)

Historians of Atlantic slavery have readily embraced material culture, from foundational work in what was once called “plantation archaeology” to the recent attention to enslaved makers that eventuated in the exhibition of David Drake’s pottery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New scholarship in textile and fashion history has deepened our understandings of diasporic aesthetic practice, while evocative artifacts like Ashley’s Sack have conveyed the affective ties of those living under bondage. This “thing-ier” history has expanded slavery’s archive just as critics have rightfully questioned whether textual sources predicated on dehumanization could ever offer meaningful insight into Black life. In sum, this is a robust moment for writing the history of slavery through beads and fabric scraps, agricultural tools, and the built environment. But it is also an opportune moment to identify the next frontiers of research into Atlantic slavery, as scholars bring insights from science and technological studies, landscape architecture, labor history, and other disciplinary corners of academia into the study of material culture. Could this work be gathered under the umbrella of “design history”? What vistas might be opened (or alternatively, foreclosed) by importing the vocabulary and analytical frames of design into the study of slavery? Where might the many contemporary practitioners who currently teach design point historical researchers interested in eighteenth and nineteenth-century cultural and social history? This Horowitz Book Prize Symposium—organized in celebration of Seth Rockman’s prize-winning book, Plantation Goods—is intended to think aloud at the intersection of slavery studies and design history, seeking new ways to advance the work of both fields in the service of a richer account of the past and a more just future.

10am:           Welcome, introduction to Plantation Goods
10:30am:      Approaches and Methodologies (eight 15-minute sessions)
1pm:             Lunch
2pm:             Long table discussion
4:30pm:        Reception

Friday, October 23, 2026
38 West 86th Street, BGC Lecture Hall