Mariah Kupfner is a scholar of material culture whose work focuses on histories of race and gender in the United States. Objects reveal the construction, performance, and negotiation of racialized and gendered identities. They are unwritten archives, bearing the traces of human labor, sentiment, and use.

In particular, Kupfner’s work focuses on the political resonances of American women’s needlework and the ways in which textiles helped construct public, political, enfranchised femininities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She asserts that gender itself is a crafted form.

A public historian, she enjoys engaging with audiences through exhibitions, speaking, and writing.