Sarah Carter

Sarah Anne Carter is the Visiting Executive Director of the Center for Design and Material Culture and Visiting Assistant Professor in Design Studies in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She previously served as the Curator and Director of Research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While at Chipstone, she collaboratively curated many innovative museum exhibitions, including Mrs. M.-----‘s Cabinet at the Milwaukee Art Museum and Florence Eiseman: Designing Childhood for the American Century at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, and directed Chipstone’s Think Tank Program in support of progressive curatorial practice. Carter’s recent book Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (Oxford University Press 2018) was published last fall. She is also co-author of Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects (Oxford University Press 2015) and co-editor with Ivan Gaskell of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture. From 2010-2012, she was a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard. Carter received her Ph.D. in American Studies and her MA and BA in History from Harvard University, as well as an MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.