Martha J. McNamara

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Martha McNamara is an Associate Professor of Public History in the History Department at UMass Amherst. She is a cultural historian of 18th- and 19th- century New England specializing in visual and material culture with a particular interest in the history of slavery and its enduring legacies. From 2007 to 2025 she was Director of the New England Arts and Architecture Program at Wellesley College where she taught courses in American art and architectural history, material culture studies, historic preservation, the history of cities, and cultural landscape studies. In 2024 she was the Stern Visiting Professor in Architectural History at Columbia University’s Art History and Archaeology Department. From 1994 to 2007, McNamara served as an Assistant and then Associate Professor of History at the University of Maine, Orono.

McNamara received her MA and PhD in American Studies from Boston University. She is the author of From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture and Ritual in American Law, 1658-1860 (Johns Hopkins, 2004); co-editor (with Georgia Barnhill) of New Views of New England: Studies in Material and Visual Culture, 1680- 1830 (Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2012), and co-editor of Amateur Movie-Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915-1960 (Indiana University Press, 2017) which won the 2018 prize for “Best Edited Collection” from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Professor McNamara has been a research fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale; Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History, and Columbia’s Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. She is the recipient of grants from the Getty Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Henry Luce Foundation. She is a co- Principal Investigator and lead author of “Transforming Stories, Spaces, Lives: Rethinking Inclusion and Exclusion through the Humanities at Wellesley College,” a Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times Grant designed to foster humanities- based critical thinking, reflective scholarship, and civic engagement among students and faculty at Wellesley College. Professor McNamara is also an active public historian working with a variety of non-profit, cultural organizations to promote a critical understanding of the past as a way to make sense of the present.

Currently Professor McNamara is working on two scholarly projects: a book manuscript entitled Tovookan’s Tale: Pictorial Autobiography and Anti-Slavery Narrative in Antebellum America, that examines the life and work of African artist Pedro Tovookan Parris and his experience with slavery and freedom in the 19th- century Atlantic world and a book-length study of the New England landscape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
 

• Ph.D., Boston University, 1995
• M.A., Boston University, 1989
• B.A., Wesleyan University, 1982 

• Public History
• Material Culture
• Vernacular Architecture
• Cultural Landscape Studies
• History of Slavery 

Books: 

• Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915-1960, ed., Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon. Indiana University Press, 2017. Winner of 2018 Best Edited Volume Prize, Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
• New Views of New England: Studies in Material and Visual Culture, 1680-1830, ed., Martha J. McNamara and Georgia B. Barnhill. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2012.
• Calculated Risks: New Work by Faculty Artists, ed., Meredith Martin and Martha J. McNamara. Wellesley, MA: Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, 2010.
• From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture and Ritual in American Law, 1658-1860. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Peer-reviewed Essays and Book Chapters:

• “Picturing Displacement: Moving Panoramas, Print Culture, and the Pictorial Slave  Narrative of Pedro Tovookan Parris” in Design, Displacement, Migration: Spatial       and Material Histories, ed., Sarah Lichtman and Jilly Traganou. London: Routledge, 2024.
• “Comedic Counterpoise: Landscape and Laughs in the Films of Sidney N. Shurcliff” in Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915-1960, ed., Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon. Indiana University Press, 2017.
• “Re-figuring Urban Space: Race and Ethnicity in Printed Views of New England, 1800-50” in Portraits of the City: Dublin in the Wider World, ed., Gillian O’Brien and Finola O’Kane. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012.
• “The Materiality of Experience in Early New England” in New Views of New England: Studies in Material and Visual Culture, 1680-1830, ed., Martha J. McNamara and Georgia B. Barnhill. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2012.
• “Republican Art and Architecture” in Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed., Jane Kamensky and Edward Gray. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• “A Nanny and Her Charges,” in A Generous Medium: Photography at Wellesley, 1972-2012, ed. Lisa Fischman, Lucy Flint and Hannah Townsend, et al. Wellesley, MA: Davis Museum, Wellesley College, 2012.
• “Civic Architecture.” In Encyclopedia of New England Culture, edited by Burt Feintuch, et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
• “Architecture, 1761-1812,” and “Charles Bulfinch.” In Paul Gilje, ed., Revolution and New Nation (1761 to 1812) vol. 3 of Encyclopedia of American History, Gary Nash, ed. New York: Facts on File, 2003. 
   

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles:

• “‘In the face of the court’: Law, Commerce, and the Transformation of Public Space in Boston, 1650-1770,” Winterthur Portfolio 36 (April 2002): 125-139.
• “Defining the Profession: Books, Libraries, and Architects” in American Architects and Their Books to 1848, ed., Kenneth Hafertepe and James F. O’Gorman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
• “From Common Land to Public Space: The Frog Pond and Mall at Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1765-1825.”  In Shaping Communities: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture VI, ed., Elizabeth Cromley and Carter Hudgins. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997.

Commissioned Essays:        

• “A Pictorial Slave Narrative,” Historic New England (Summer, 2019), p. 12-15.

Journals Edited:

• Maine History, Quarterly state history journal published by Maine Historical Society, 1997-2007    

Prizes, Grants & Fellowships 

• “Transforming Stories, Spaces, Lives: Rethinking Inclusion and Exclusion through the Humanities at Wellesley College,” Mellon Foundation, Humanities for All Times Grant (3 years; $1.5 million), Co-Principal Investigator, January, 2024 – June 2027.
• Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, Research Fellowship, 2022.
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Best Edited Volume, 2018 for Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915-1960, ed., Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon. Indiana University Press, 2017.
• Getty Foundation, Keeping it Modern Architectural Conservation Grants, “Jewett  Arts Center: A Conservation Plan,” Project Historian, 2015-2016.
• VAF Ambassadors Award, Vernacular Architecture Forum, Annual Meeting, Butte, Montana, 2009.
• Harvard University, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History Fellow, 2004-2005.
• Getty Grant Program, Campus Heritage Grants, “A Historic Preservation Master Plan for the University of Maine, Orono,” Principal Investigator, 2004-2005.
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, 2004.
• University of Maine, Faculty Research Grant for “New England Visions: Landscape Representation in History and Art, 1790-1850,” 2001-2002.
• DeMontequin Prize for the best paper in American colonial planning, Society foR American City and Regional Planning History, 8th Biennial Meeting, Washington, D.C., 1999.
• J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities, 1996-1997.
• Columbia University, Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, National Dissertation Fellowship, 1992-1994.
• Henry Luce Foundation Fellowship, 1989-1990.

• HIST 661: American Material Culture (Fall 2025)