Talks and Workshops

From Bullet Bras to Bombshells: How Plastics Shaped Postwar Bodies

New York Historical

New York, February, 19, 2025

From Bullet Bras to Bombshells: A Queer History of Plastics and Postwar Femininities

(invited talk)

NYU MA Program in Costume Studies

New York, August 30, 2024

Bioplastics and Sustainable Design Futures

(invited scholar)

Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Scholars Day

New York, April 5, 2024

“Revisiting Lisa Krohn’s Cyberdesk (1993), A Cyberfeminist Concept Model” with designer Lisa Krohn, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and SFMOMA

(invited commentator)

Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) Annual Meeting

Long Beach, CA, October 27, 2023

“Shaping Foundations: Trans Feminine Self-Fashioning, DIY, and Community Building in the Postwar US”

Smithsonian Pride Alliance and Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Washington, D.C., June 13, 2023

“Falsies Unbound”

(invited talk)

Fashion Unbound: Fashion Studies Seminar 

The New School (School of Art and Design History and Theory)

New York, April 17, 2023

“Bombshells, Bullet Bras, Bikinis: Military-Industrial Synthetics and The Body”

(invited keynote)

ICOM-CC Textiles and Modern Materials and Contemporary Art Working Group Conference: “Semi-synthetic and Synthetic Textile Materials in Fashion, Design and Art”

Online, February 21, 2023

“Redefining Nude: Exhibition Talk”

(invited talk)

Fashion and Justice Speaker Series, Textiles and Clothing Museum

Iowa State University, January 10, 2023

“Soft Power: Plastic Foams, Design, and Postwar Bodies’’

(invited seminar)

Hagley Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society

Wilmington, DE, November 16, 2022

“Nylon: Redefining Nude”

(invited talk)

Bard Graduate Center 

New York, October 11, 2022

“Redesigning Realness: A Queer History of ‘Falsies’’’ 

Costume Society of America, 2022 Annual Meeting

Minneapolis, MN, May 28, 2022

“Nylon and ‘The Test Tube Girl’: Reimagining Plastic Futures”

(invited talk)

Science History Institute, Philadelphia, PA, May 5, 2022

Complex Conversations in Fashion History: Challenging Objects and Histories within Fashion Collections

(invited panelist)

Costume Society of America

Conversations on Dress Webinar Series. April 19, 2022

Virtual-Behind-The Scenes: Collection Highlights from The Science History Institute

(invited talk on Redefining Nude exhibition) 

Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia

Philadelphia, PA, February 24, 2022

Touching: Comment

(invited commentator) 

Reach Out and Touch Someone: A Conference On Commercial Intimacy and Personalization (Hagley 2021 Fall Conference)

Wilmington, DE, November 5, 2021

“The Queer Afterlives of Postwar Plastics”

Presented in “Technology, Aesthetics and the Body,” chaired by Alka Menon (Yale University) and Alok Vaid-Menon (Rutgers University).

Society for the Social Studies of Science (4s) 2021 Annual Meeting

Toronto, Canada. October 8, 2021

“Silastic Demonstration Mammary Sizer Implant” 

Digitizing Materiality: On the Fabric of Human Bodies Workshop

Science History Institute, Philadelphia, PA, September 16, 2021

“Postwar Plastics and the Fashioned Body”

(invited talk)

Winterthur Conservation Class: Applications of Science in Textile Manufacture, Degradation, Preservation, and Treatment 

University of Delaware, Newark, DE, April 8, 2021 

The Miracle and Menace of Plastic

(featured guest)

The Pulse, WHYY, NPR (National Public Radio)

Philadelphia, PA. Air date: January 15, 2021