Event Details
A part of our Cornerstones of History lecture series.
A part of our Cornerstones of History lecture series.
Rebecca S. Graff is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lake Forest College (PhD and MA, University of Chicago; BA, University of California, Berkeley). A historical archaeologist with research interests in the 19th- and 20th-century urban United States, she explores the relationship between temporality and modernity, consumerism and material culture, and contemporary heritage and urbanism through archaeological and archival research. Her book, Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism During Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair (2020) focused on the ephemeral “White City” and Midway Plaisance of the 1893 Chicago Fair and the modern disposal practices seen at the Louis Sullivan- and Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Charnley-Persky House. In Chicago, Graff has also excavated the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument (2016), the Gray-Cloud House (2018), Mecca Flats (2018), Armour Mission and Armour Flats (2023), and the Edith Farnsworth House (2021, 2024). In 2019, she led excavations at the former site of the African Methodist Episcopal Church on the campus of Lake Forest College. With Pauline Saliga and the Society of Architectural Historians, Graff co-curated The City Beyond the White City: Race, Two Chicago Homes, and Their Neighborhoods, 1892–2022.
Chicago’s cultural heritage scene is dominated by architectural preservation organizations that are supported by an “architourism” industry. Together they celebrate extant works by world-famous architects like Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Current archaeological research in Chicago undertaken in collaboration with architects and architectural historians has demonstrated how the social histories of these celebrated structures can be illuminated, if not outright discovered, through archaeology. But these fragments are produced by what I term the “conspicuous disposal” of building materials–something that is only accelerated by processes of urban renewal. To understand the interaction of fragments and narratives through conspicuous disposal, this talk draws on archaeological work on the former site of the Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and sites designed by Sullivan, Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
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