Written by Nicole Etter
During her time as a Design Studies doctoral student at University of Wisconsin–Madison, Natalie Wright has developed a remarkable resume as an emerging scholar in material culture.
Wright worked as a curatorial fellow in the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture in the School of Human Ecology, where she curated several exhibits. Then she spent the 2023-2024 academic year as the George Gurney Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
More recently, Wright was one of just seven doctoral students nationwide selected for the prestigious Luce/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship in American Art.
The fellowship provides $42,000 in funding to support Wright while she finishes researching and writing her dissertation titled, Functional Fashions: Dress and Disability in the United States, 1950–1975.
“Even with the end of my degree program in sight, I still deeply love my dissertation topic. It keeps giving, and I want to see it have so many iterations after this is done,” Wright says. “I really feel as though I owe it to the people whose lives I am writing about–designers, models, doctors, policy makers–and whose stories are just so compelling.“
Wright, who grew up in Canada and England, fell in love with museums while attending high school in London. After earning her master’s degree in American material culture, she spent three years at the Chipstone Foundation, a Milwaukee organization dedicated to the decorative arts. She worked alongside Sarah Anne Carter, who was then the foundation’s curator and director of research.
When Carter joined UW–Madison as the executive director of the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture and a professor of Design Studies, Wright decided to follow her mentor to Madison to pursue a doctoral degree.
Wright was also eager for the chance to work with Marina Moskowitz, a professor of Design Studies and the Lynn and Gary Mecklenburg Chair in Textiles, Material Culture and Design. Moskowitz, whom Wright calls a “fantastic scholar and teacher,” became her advisor.
The Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design & Material Culture was also a draw, including the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, one of the largest university-held collections of its kind. The center is housed in Nancy Nicholas Hall.
“The center does an amazing job of creating curatorial opportunities for students,” Wright says. “A lot of my professional background is working in museums and trying to find innovative ways of presenting historic material to new audiences, and the collection is incredible for that. It gives us invaluable professional experience.”
One of the highlights of Wright’s time in the center was curating the Rapid Response Mask Collecting Project, an online exhibition of 22 face coverings from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were trying to emulate this form of collecting that the Victoria & Albert Museum in London started called rapid response collecting, where museum collections can quickly respond to a major event by collecting what the curators are seeing around them that feel like potent and important objects for future historians and storytellers,” Wright explains.
In 2021, she co-curated Politics at Home: Textiles as American History and then was associate curator for Questioning Things: A Quarter Century of Material Culture Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2022.
As the home of the UW Disabilities Studies Initiative, UW–Madison was also the ideal place for Wright to explore her interest in disability studies. Wright’s brother has cerebral palsy, and her academic curiosity was piqued when she learned about Milwaukee-based designer Florence Eiseman’s pioneering work designing clothes for children with disabilities in the 1960s. Wright’s time at the Smithsonian, where she worked alongside leading scholars in disability history and material culture, provided even more inspiration for her dissertation on the history of garments designed for and by people with disabilities.
“This project recovers a little-known historical moment when fashionable clothing—made by top manufacturers and modeled by chic subjects—became central to a project of integrating disabled individuals into mainstream society,” Wright wrote in her abstract. “The goal was to make wearers ‘functional,’ a concept that brought together the technical construction of clothing with medical and social ideals of rehabilitation.”
After Wright graduates from UW–Madison in 2026, she hopes to continue to pursue her passion for material culture in a museum or university setting.
“I would really love to work in a place where I could develop and convey new research and ideas to members of the public,” she says. “That would be fantastic.”