Researcher Spotlights are Q&As that shine a light on School of Human Ecology faculty members’ unique scholarship and research interests.
Sarah Anne Carter is the Chipstone Foundation Design and Material Culture Chair, an associate professor of Design Studies and the executive director of the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture (CDMC). She is an interdisciplinary material culture scholar whose work centers on histories of museums, material things, children, childhood and the family, domestic interiors and the home, and American social and cultural life more broadly. She teaches courses on historic interiors, material culture theory and methods, and the material culture of childhood.
In fall 2025, Carter became the Chipstone Foundation Design and Material Culture Chair, a position funded by The Chipstone Foundation, a Milwaukee-based organization focused on promoting appreciation and knowledge of American material culture. Carter says this endowed role allows her to invest more deeply in her students, her research and the CDMC’s mission of supporting the study of material culture, textiles and design at UW–Madison in a sustainable, long-term way. She hopes the opportunity will create new pathways for those who collaborate with the CDMC, enhance the undergraduate experience and lead to unique and exciting opportunities for graduate students.
How did you become interested in your area of study?
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t excited to go to museums or look closely at material things. Growing up, my family loved going to historical sites and museums and stopping at roadside markers, so that has always been part of my experience of moving through the world. I really wanted to be in those spaces as a professional and was curious about how to tell meaningful stories about the past, and how curators and other scholars can connect past, present and future in impactful ways.
When I went to college, I decided to concentrate on American history and realized there were many different ways to think about it. In working with a professor who became an important mentor to me, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, I learned there was a set of approaches called material culture, which allows you to move beyond a library or archive and take a critical historical approach to everything around you — to think about material things in museums or antique shops or even the chair you’re sitting in as sources that can help you make sense of the world. You could think about the people who used, made, sold or saved those things, the systems that created or valued those objects, and those questions could open you up to deeper and more interesting ways of understanding the world. I was able to explore these ideas through several museum internships and spent two years studying material culture and object connoisseurship at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware.
What’s your motivation for doing this type of work, and how does it impact human well-being?
My research is founded on the notion that the history of material things is closely aligned with the history of ideas. Being in the Design Studies department invites me to reflect on the relationships between objects and ideas every day, because I have the privilege of teaching designers — people who will shape the material world that we live in. To do that well, we have to understand the material history of our world and the diversity of human experiences that we have a responsibility to design for and with, and I find that really exciting. I think a lot about my work as connecting the past, present and future, so through teaching my students about the history of design and material culture, they’re also understanding something about the world today and imagining what a future world could look like with them as designers.
Being situated in the School of Human Ecology opens other opportunities as well. I have collaborated with colleagues from the Child Development Lab and the Human Development & Family Studies department to think about children’s material experiences past, present and future. In the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture we also work with the Consumer Science department to train future financial coaches in thinking about how objects help us learn what people value, and with the Civil Society & Community Studies department to consider objects in the context of community-based work.
Where do you see an opportunity to shift a conversation?
So much of the work we do at the School of Human Ecology is deeply connected to the material world, and I would love to see a more robust conversation about design and material culture throughout our school and among our colleagues across campus and our partners.
This is reflected in a book my Design Studies colleague Professor Marina Moskowitz and I have been working on for University of Delaware Press on the material histories of home economics. Our book argues that you can look to early home economics departments like ours to see the origins of material culture studies. The scholars and practitioners who started our school and others like it took the material world seriously as a source of study and as a means for improving the world.
What has surprised you about working in your field?
I’ve been surprised and gratified by how truly interdisciplinary the School of Human Ecology is, and I think that’s one of the real gifts of this school — it really does make space for material culture and object-based analysis. From the beginning of my academic career I’ve believed that we could bring material culture methods into a wide range of classes, and it’s meaningful to see that realized across the university through the work of the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture. I am able to invite my colleagues into a place where, along with their students, they’re engaging with something they might be unfamiliar with, but which could raise new and meaningful questions.
Are there any common misconceptions about your work?
Some of my colleagues in material culture studies have historically had a bit of a chip on their shoulders, suggesting that it’s “pots and pans history” or it isn’t important because it’s the history of everyday life. I’ve always felt that’s why it is so interesting — we have the opportunity to try to understand people’s lived experiences.
We have nearly 14,000 objects in the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection. Some of these objects are absolute treasures and could be considered works of art, and many of them are common objects that you’re not going to find in an art museum. But if you engage with these objects and study them, they repay you by opening windows onto people’s experiences. Whether it’s a sampler made by a school girl, a suit worn by a professional woman in the mid-20th century or yardage used in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed interior, all of these things tell us something about the world if we slow down and look closely.
What do you see as the most critical question currently facing your field?
Much of my research engages with the history of object-based study and object-based knowledge. Part of my work is making sure students build skills in engaging with material things. For graduate students, that could be learning about textiles and understanding the materials in our collection, or developing skills that could fuel future research, teaching or creative work. For undergraduates, it’s about building a toolkit that gives someone the ability to sit down, take a close look and engage materially with objects in front of them, because that’s an ideal way of teaching critical thinking skills. Our students are learning how to think in the moment, how to ask questions, how to look closely, how to synthesize information, how to develop hypotheses and how to make connections between objects and ideas. These are key skills we can teach and practice through object-based work.
Who are some individuals who have influenced your work?
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who I mentioned, who was my undergraduate advisor, has been a key mentor. When I returned to Harvard for my PhD in American Studies after two years at the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, she also co-advised my dissertation. Her generous approach to mentorship, undergraduate teaching and collaboration has been a model for me. My co-advisor Jennifer Roberts has also been a wonderful mentor and taught me how to talk about the significance of my work across disciplinary boundaries, which has been crucial in the School of Human Ecology.
Another really important teacher and collaborator has been Ivan Gaskell, who’s now a professor at the Bard Graduate Center. Ivan models how to combine curatorial work with academic work, as has Ned Cooke at Yale, who is also on the Chipstone board. Jonathan Prown, the director of The Chipstone Foundation, has been a wonderful mentor to me for many years, particularly around what it means to do innovative curatorial work. We had the pleasure of working at Chipstone for several years and were able to curate many collaborative exhibits and think together about the future of decorative arts and material culture scholarship. All of these teachers and role models shape my work here.
What else should the Human Ecology community know about you?
I love to collaborate on projects that are both inside and outside of my field, and one of the things I love about my position in the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture is that it sometimes allows me to be a matchmaker for collaboration, to help people connect around meaningful ideas, in addition to doing some of that collaborative work myself. I feel very lucky that I’m in a school where we are focused on rigorous scholarly work, impactful teaching and outreach, and trying to realize a better world through our work together — I do not take any of this for granted.