Julia Silverman is a PhD candidate in the History of Art + Architecture (secondary field in American Studies), where her research focuses on how craft and design have naturalized and resisted American colonial ideologies during the 19th and 20th centuries. Broadly, she is interested in how the material practices of art and design tacitly structure or complicate peoples' understandings of concepts like value, knowledge, and truth. 

Her dissertation-in-progress examines Native American arts and crafts projects developed during the 1930s, a period marked by the seeming reversal of assimilationist Indian policy and the search for an American "useable past." Analyzing historical—and sometimes dubiously-ethical—interventions into Native artistic production by non-Native individuals, governmental organizations, and private institutions, her dissertation illustrates how Native artists consistently redefined slippery period terms like “tradition” or “authenticity” that outsiders used to regulate their work. From a museum’s purported invention of a Hopi style to the interwar manufacture of a Seneca ethnological collection or an Iñupiat craft collective’s military contract, each chapter illuminates how project participants destabilized colonial understandings of these tropes in ways that served their communities’ vitality. This work has been supported by the Center for Craft, Crystal Bridges Museum, the University of Arkansas, The Decorative Arts Trust, the D'Arcy McNickle Center at the Newberry Library, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, among others.