Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History

Professor Edward S. Cooke, Jr., the Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, has written widely on early modern and modern material culture, with an emphasis on the relationship between production and consumption.  His books include Making Furniture in Pre-industrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut (Johns Hopkins Press, 1996) and Inventing Boston: Design, Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World, 1680–1720 (Yale University Press, 2019).  

Cooke has also written extensively on modern craft, historicizing and explicating more recent forms of production.  This can be seen in his role as founding co-editor of The Journal of Modern Craft and guest editor of a special issue of American Art focusing upon craft as well as his work as co-curator and publication author of six different exhibitions: New American Furniture (Museum of Fine Arts, 1989); Inspiring Reform: Boston’s Arts and Crafts Movement (Davis Museum, Wellesley College, 1997)...