MIDDLETOWN, Pa. — Penn State Harrisburg faculty member Mariah Kupfner was awarded the Lord Baltimore Research Fellowship from the Maryland Center for History and Culture, which will support her in dedicated research in collections at the center’s museum and H. Furlong Baldwin Library.
Kupfner, assistant professor of American studies and public heritage in the School of Humanities, was one of three individuals awarded the fellowship for 2026-27. She plans to examine the textile efforts of free Black and Jewish girls in early 19th-century Baltimore, focusing on the relationship between marginalized identity, property-holding, textile labors and girlhood needlework.
“This fellowship will grant me access to essential archives for my project,” Kupfner said. “It is an exciting piece of support for my scholarship on race, gender, class, ethnicity and needlework. I am delighted to be able to dig into such a robust collection of primary sources.”
Many young girls in Baltimore in the early 19th century embroidered depictions of houses, Kupfner said, and she has been interested in what that might have meant for the girls, particularly before women’s property rights were legalized.
“I am especially interested in what it meant for marginalized girls, who often studied needlework in order to help secure their family’s class position,” she said.
The project expands on work Kupfner has already done on free Black girls’ needlework in Baltimore. The fellowship will enable her to see some of that needlework firsthand.
She will also expand her research on Jewish immigrants in Baltimore in the early 19th century. At that time, many recent Jewish immigrants were pushed into poor-paying textile trades and the second-hand market in garments, Kupfner said. More established Jewish families might have had access to material security and education but were still legally barred from full civic participation until 1826. In both cases, their daughters’ decorative needlework was a form of “leisured labor” that could help secure a more prosperous future, she said.
“I’m interested in the ways that textile skills are classed and racialized,” Kupfner said. “In this project, I hope to deepen my understanding of these girls' stitched efforts and to track the relationship between forms of employment and career trajectories for both free Black and Jewish families who invested in their daughters’ textile education.”
Kupfner studies the intersection of women’s history and material culture. She is the author of “Crafting womanhood, needlework, gender and politics in the United States, 1810 to 1920.” She was a 2024-26 Penn State Teaching and Learning with Technology Fellow, working to incorporate virtual reality and other digital tools in the humanities classroom.