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 Julia Silverman is a PhD candidate in the History of Art + Architecture (secondary field in American Studies), where her research focuses on how craft and design have both naturalized and resisted American colonial ideologies during the 19th and 20th centuries. With interests ranging from alternative theorizations of abstraction to whaling to the visual history of natural and social sciences, she is currently working with the Hopi Tribe of Northern Arizona on a project that explores the intersecting--and enduring--histories of design practice, federal craft legislation, and intellectual property. Broadly, she is interested in how art historical study and community-based research can redefine legal and colloquial understandings of value and ownership with regards to visual material.

 During the 2021-22 academic year, Julia will be in residence at the Crystal Bridges Museum as a Tyson Scholar working on a dissertation tentatively titled "Designing a Useable Future During the 'Indian New Deal,'" which examines how Native-led craft revival projects in the 1930s and 40s, developed in tandem with federal arts policies, renegotiated period understandings of technology, property, and historicity that were central to the development of art, anthropology, and science. Julia's work has also been supported by Harvard's Graduate Society, the Association of Historians of American Art, the D'Arcy McNickle Center at the Newberry Library, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Otsego Institute of Native American Art History.