Elizabeth Muir is a writer and historian of material culture and design. She recently graduated with a Master’s Degree in Curatorial Studies and the History of Design with distinction and departmental honors from the New School. Elizabeth was a student curator of the “New York Crystal Palace 1853” exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center, and she is a former fellow of both Historic Deerfield and the Cooper Hewitt Museum. In her writing, she specializes in bringing the richness of Victorian material culture alive, in particular looking at the manifestation of the Gothic Revival movement in American jewelry and the work of female metalsmiths. This year, Elizabeth was awarded the Lee B. Anderson Memorial Grant to further her writing on material culture, which she has been using to craft an in-depth study of the Arts and Crafts jewelry of the women-led Kalo Shop. This year, Elizabeth’s paper “A ‘Tidy Den of Assignation’ the Material Culture of Sex Work in Nineteenth-Century New York” looks at the objects worn and used by the sex workers of antebellum New York, and was recently accepted into the Mid-Atlantic Material Culture Conference.

NYC Jewelry Week is proud that Elizabeth Muir will write about select exhibitions and events.