Potential Research Topics

Oliver Hastings House at 101 Brattle Street.

Topic 1: My primary research goal for this course is centered on the examination and study of historic domestic architecture across Cambridge, primarily across the city’s historic district and conservation districts. With this project, I hope to create a digital collection of renovated and well-kept homes in each district, hopefully collecting examples of a variety of architectural styles, from Victorian, to colonial, to Georgian, and even Arts & Crafts. I would like to incorporate the Cambridge Historical Commission’s records on each of these homes, to make each individual case study extremely informational and reflective of the social and economic class they were intended for when they were built (and how that has changed or altered). I would also like to take this project as an opportunity to incorporate social and class commentary on the exclusivity inherent to many of these neighborhoods across Cambridge, and how they have been hallmarks of class distinction and luxury not only in recent history with the exponential increase in their cost, but also in the earliest development of their construction as well, when they were intended for upper-class and elite families that had likely profited off the slave trade, or even continued to contribute to it. This segment of the project would undoubtedly include references to the Brattle Street mansions that make up the area known as Tory Row or the King's Highway, where individual slaves were known to have lived as part of the sprawling properties these historic elites enjoyed.

Benin bronzes, from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Topic 2: For my second idea, I wanted to create a digital archive and museum exhibition using a digital exhibition site I have worked with in the past that allows me to design and curate a space in any way, shape, or form. I would use this site to create a proposed expansion wing in the Harvard Art Museums that would focus on African art specifically and expand the museum’s collection as it relates to pre-modern African art and architectural study, in an aim to establish commentary about how the museum has only continued to contribute to Cambridge and Harvard Square’s history of ostracizing, ignoring, and hiding the history of black communities both within it and beyond it. I would look within partner museums like the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology for pieces that would already contribute to my proposed exhibition, but I would also look beyond sister institutions and across the globe country (and even locally) to find objects that could be acquired by the museum respectfully and legally, and could be used to honor and respect the legacy of black Cambridge residents through a modern lens, but also African descendants and even local African communities as well, without having to limit them to a singular shared gallery space.