The Herbert E. Carter Travel Award made it possible for me to attend the annual American Studies Association (ASA) meeting in Oakland, California. I presented a paper entitled “American Museums and Postcolonial Identities: Early Anthropological Collections Revisited.” Our panel – Memory, Materiality, and the Museum – was a success in several respects. All of the papers on the panel overlapped and intersected in provocative and useful ways: my discussion of changing cultural property rights and the politics of representational authority in anthropology museums corresponded nicely with the other papers, which analyzed representational strategies at the Museum of African Diaspora, as well as the politics of representing African American communities in the post-Civil Rights era at the proposed National Museum of African American History and Culture. As a result, discussion following the panel was particularly productive and I made valuable connections with individuals working in related areas.

This year’s theme for the conference was The United States from Inside and Out: Transnational American Studies. Panels that I found especially interesting (such as The Great American Makeover: Television, History, Nation and The U.S. Inside Out: Early American Experience) drew upon this theme in both contemporary and early colonial contexts. The Material Culture and Identity panel was most closely aligned with my own research interests. And one of the papers on this panel, “Zuni-Made Man: Frank Hamilton Cushing and the Power of Material Culture,” was related to my own dissertation research in informative ways. What I most appreciate about this opportunity to present at the ASA conference was the chance I was given to share my dissertation research and analysis with specialists in the same field and receive valuable feedback in the process.