Historic Deerfield, Winter Lecture Series

The 2025 Winter Lecture Series will take place on Zoom from 2-3pm on the following Sundays: January 26, February 23, March 30, April 27. Lectures are free, but registration is required.

Early New Englanders frequently invoked the passage of time in religious terms, but the “horological revolution” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced technological developments in timepieces that complemented older cultural views of time. These developments went on to play an important role in the standardization of timekeeping, the rise of market economies, and industrialization. Sundials, mechanical clocks, and pocket watches were not only scientific marvels but also style-bearing objects that displayed refinement. Such objects provide suggestive windows into everyday life, especially when we broaden our sense of the many different objects and practices that marked the passage of time for diverse early Americans. This series features speakers who will address both the abstract and material nature of time found not only in clocks but also in other objects and processes central to life in early New England such as brewing, needlework, husbandry, farming, and cooking. Together the presentations will complicate our sense of what the passage of time meant for early New Englanders who had more than one way to “keep” and “spend” time.  All lectures are free of charge and will be presented virtually via Zoom webinar.

Sunday, February 23, 2 p.m. – Alexandra Macdonald, Ph.D. candidate in History at William & Mary

Alexandra M. Macdonald, Ph.D, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Brock University

Lecture: “‘Regard not time, but this sign’: Recipes and Embodied Knowledge in Early America”

Alexandra M. Macdonald is an historian of labour and the body with a particular interest in embodied knowledge and practices of making in the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. As part of her research, she is interested in using period specific ingredients and methods to recreate historical craft and culinary recipes, for example indigo vats and preserved food. Alexandra has received a number of fellowships to support her research, including a fellowship from the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium which brought her to Deerfield. Most recently she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library where she worked closely with conservation scientists to analyze a canvaswork embroidery made in Connecticut in the mid-eighteenth century. She is currently the Social Science and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Brock University where she is working on her second project, a book length study of indigo in the Atlantic world.

Sunday, March 30, 2 p.m. – Sara Schechner, Curator Emerita, Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University

Sunday, April 27, 2 p.m. – Elizabeth Beacon Eager, Assistant Professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University

Register here.