Ram Research Directory

Janneken Smucker

Education

• B.A., History/Women’s Studies, Goshen College, May 1998
• M.A., Textile History/Museum Studies, University of Nebraska, 2003
• Ph.D., History, University of Delaware, August 2010

Research Interests

digital historypublic historymaterial culture

Opportunities

Work Study Positions Available: No

Grant Funded Positions Available: No

Course-Credit Research Opportunities Available: No

Volunteer Research Positions Available: No

Biography

Janneken Smucker specializes in digital history, public history, and material culture. She authored Amish Quilts: Crafting an American Icon (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), and lectures and writes widely about quilts for both popular and scholarly audiences. Janneken volunteers with the national non-profit, Quilt Alliance, dedicated to documenting, preserving, and sharing the stories of quilts and quiltmakers. She led content development for World Quilts: The American Story, a digital project of the International Quilt Study Center & Museum at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. Her current research investigates the role of quilts in New Deal governmental programs. In the classroom, she integrates technology and the humanities, working with her students to create websites, blogs, podcasts, digital archives, and online exhibitions. With Professor Charles Hardy and students in HIS 601 and HON 452, she created Goin' North: Stories from the First Great Migration to Philadelphia, which won the Oral History Association's 2015 award for best non-print project and the 2016 American Historical Association's Roy Rosenzweig Award for Innovation in Digital History. She and Dr. Hardy also were co-recipients of WCU's 2015 Holman Award for innovation in teaching. Their latest classroom/archival partnership, Philadelphia Immigration Janneken is an avid yogi, gardener, pizza chef, and quiltmaker. She is also the mother of a 9-year old girl, and enjoys seeing the world through her eyes as she makes connections and discovers new things. She loves thinking—and traveling—beyond national borders, and is glad to be a global citizen.

Contact Information

Phone: 610-436-2345

List of Publications

• Amish Quilts: Crafting an American Icon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. A New Deal for Quilts, forthcoming with International Quilt Museum, expected October 2023. “Tracking the Amish Quilt: Warren and Jane Rohrer’s Search for a Usable Past,” in Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer, forthcoming from Pennsylvania State University Press and the Palmer Museum of Art, 2020. “Access and Empowerment: Re-discovering Moments in the Lives of African-American Migrant Women,” The Digital Black Atlantic, Debates in the Digital Humanities Series, University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Foreword to Quilting the New Classics: 20 Inspired Quilt Projects: Traditional to Modern Designs, by Michele Muska (New York: Sixth and Spring Books, 2014). “Unconventional Wisdom: The Myths and Quilts that Came Before,” in Roderick Kiracofe, Unconventional and Unexpected: American Quilts Below the Radar, 1950-2000 (New York: STC Craft, Melanie Falick Books, A Division of Abrams, 2014), second edition, QuiltFolk, 2022. Contributor, “Workt By Hand”: Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts. Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 2013. With Joe Cunningham and Robert Shaw. Amish Abstractions: Quilts from the Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown. San Francisco, CA: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2009. With Patricia Cox Crews and Linda Welters. Amish Crib Quilts from the Midwest: The Sara Miller Collection. Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2003.

Links

• ResearchGate