Abstract THE first time I encountered the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, I was a student at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, studying for my master's degree in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. For a course on American collectors and collections, I read the proceedings from the 2004 meeting of the Dublin Seminar—the subject being, aptly, New England Collectors and Collections.1 In that volume, I found essays that ranged from the formation of museums and antiquarian societies to the collecting of ceramics, union medallions, and Fijian trade goods. Their authors used these topics to probe broader themes of nativism, cultural appropriation, and public memory. Such themes would later inform a chapter of my dissertation on the contributions of Jewish cabinetmakers to the American Colonial Revival movement.2 In returning to this volume, I was struck by one statement made by Peter and Jane Benes in the introduction: “Students of America's material life may be looking back at a past through a prism shaped (and distorted) by the priorities, values, and mistakes of countless generations of collectors before them.”3 Looking through a prism felt like an apt metaphor for the process of sifting through past Proceedings to understand and evaluate the impact of the Dublin Seminar on the fields of decorative arts and material culture.
Erica Lome (Mon,) studied this question.