Month: June 2013

Wendy Woloson received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and wrote her dissertation on the history of confections in America, which became her first book, Refined Tastes: Sugar, Consumers, and Confectionery in 19th-Century America. For over a decade she was the Curator of Printed Books at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and comes to Rutgers-Camden having spent several years as a consultant on digital archives projects.

Her research interests include the history of material and consumer culture, used goods markets, alternative and criminal economies, and the history of capitalism. She has published several articles on the history of American consumer and material culture, and her second book, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression was published in 2009.

In addition to an edited collection of essays about 19th-century underground economies, she is currently at work on a monograph about the history of cheap goods in America, provisionally titled From Yankee Notions to Plastic Vomit: A History of Crap in America. Also a working artist with an MFA in printmaking, Wendy hopes to bring her varied experiences to her courses at Rutgers, and will be teaching Museums in the Digital Age this fall.