Kym Rice

I am a first-year Ph.D. student. For more than fifteen years I have worked in museums and historical societies as an exhibition curator and consultant, specializing in American history before 1860. My many exhibitions (including publications) include "Taverns: For the Entertainment of Friends and Strangers," sponsored by Fraunces Tavern Museum; "A Share of Honour: Virginia Women 1600-1945" for the Virginia Women's Cultural History Project; "Are We To Be A Nation?: The Making of the Federal Constitution" at The New York Public Library, and "Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South" and "A Woman's War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy," both for The Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. I've also consulted on exhibitions and interpretive plans for many institutions including the Field Museum, Monticello, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. Presently I am the Assistant Director of the Museum Studies Program at The George Washington University and an Assistant Professor. My current research centers on the antebellum Upper South, especially Washington, D.C. I am working on an exhibition about antislavery activity in the Chesapeake between 1776 and 1865 for the Maryland Historical Society funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. My most recent publication is a co-authored essay (with Barbara G. Carson and Ellen Kirven Donald), "Household Encounters: Servants, Slaves, and Mistresses in Early Washington," which appears in the Henry Francis duPont Winterthur Museum's The American Home: Material Culture, Domestic Space, and Family Life, published in November 1998.

kym@gwu.edu