Rebecca S. Graff

Biography

As a historical archaeologist with research interests in the 19th- and 20th-century urban United States, I explore the relationship between temporality and modernity, memory and material culture, tourism, and nostalgic consumption through archaeological and archival research. My dissertation, “The Vanishing City: Time, Tourism, and the Archaeology of Event at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition,” was based on an archaeological and archival project focusing on the ephemeral “White City” and Midway Plaisance of the 1893 Chicago Fair. This project was supported by the College, Department of Anthropology, and the Women’s Board of the University of Chicago, and by a Scherer Center Dissertation Year Fellowship from Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, University of Chicago. I have directed several archaeological projects in Chicago, most recently at the Louis Sullivan-designed Charnley-Persky House; a second excavation season is planned for summer 2014.

I earned my PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2011. I hold a BA in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. At the University of Chicago, I taught undergraduate and graduate students as a preceptor and instructor in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS), and explored classic readings in social science theory as an instructor in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division. I have directed or co-directed four archaeological undergraduate field schools for DePaul University and the University of Chicago. In 2013 I was honored to win the Kathleen Kirk Gilmore Dissertation Award from the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA), and am currently working on a volume to be published through the SHA.