Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
SYMPOISUM | Thinking Through Tea: Art, Resistance, and Global Entanglements in the Age of American Independence (Thursday, May 7, 2026–Friday, May 8, 2026)
Marking the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, this program reconsiders American resistance not as a singular political rupture, but as a material and visual process shaped through objects, images, and everyday rituals. Rather than treating independence as an abstract ideal, it asks how freedom was experienced, negotiated, resisted, and contested through practices often far from the political stage yet deeply enmeshed in global systems of extraction and exploitation. From drinking tea and sweetening foodstuffs with sugar, to furnishing interiors with tropical woods, wearing imported or locally adapted textiles, or handling silver objects, these material acts encoded both refinement and refusal.
Friday, May 8, 2026
Roundtable 2: Trade, Movement, and Empire
How did the movement of commodities (and the people who cultivated, transported, taxed, and consumed them) create new traditions, dependencies, and inequalities? Rather than treating American independence as a self-contained national event, this session situates it within global networks of trade, labor, and extraction, in order to think through the networks that both enabled revolutionary protest and reproduced new inequalities.
Moderator: Romita Ray (Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art History, Syracuse University, College of Arts and Sciences)
Speakers: Zara Anishanslin (Associate Professor of History and Art History | Director, Museum Studies & Public Engagement, University of Delaware), John Stuart Gordon (Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Curator of American Decorative Arts, Yale University Art Gallery), and Jennifer L. Anderson (Associate Professor of History, Stony Brook University)
SYMPOISUM | Thinking Through Tea: Art, Resistance, and Global Entanglements in the Age of American Independence (Thursday, May 7, 2026–Friday, May 8, 2026)
Marking the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, this program reconsiders American resistance not as a singular political rupture, but as a material and visual process shaped through objects, images, and everyday rituals. Rather than treating independence as an abstract ideal, it asks how freedom was experienced, negotiated, resisted, and contested through practices often far from the political stage yet deeply enmeshed in global systems of extraction and exploitation. From drinking tea and sweetening foodstuffs with sugar, to furnishing interiors with tropical woods, wearing imported or locally adapted textiles, or handling silver objects, these material acts encoded both refinement and refusal.
Friday, May 8, 2026
Roundtable 2: Trade, Movement, and Empire
How did the movement of commodities (and the people who cultivated, transported, taxed, and consumed them) create new traditions, dependencies, and inequalities? Rather than treating American independence as a self-contained national event, this session situates it within global networks of trade, labor, and extraction, in order to think through the networks that both enabled revolutionary protest and reproduced new inequalities.
Moderator: Romita Ray (Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art History, Syracuse University, College of Arts and Sciences)
Speakers: Zara Anishanslin (Associate Professor of History and Art History | Director, Museum Studies & Public Engagement, University of Delaware), John Stuart Gordon (Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Curator of American Decorative Arts, Yale University Art Gallery), and Jennifer L. Anderson (Associate Professor of History, Stony Brook University)
