Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

8-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

Humanities

Degree Program

Humanities, PhD

Committee Chair

Kelderman, Frank

Committee Member

Mattes, Mark

Committee Member

Sichel, Jennifer

Committee Member

Flint, Kate

Author's Keywords

Embroidery samplers; needlework; material culture; literature; women; Victorian

Abstract

Originally designed as practice pieces, embroidery samplers have long been studied as domestic objects and part of sewing history. Interpretations of the material and textual significance of individual samplers is less common. However, recent scholarly attention has turned to using sewing practices and objects as a means for understanding individual stitchers and their contributions to public discourse. As such, a focused study of the material and textual content of embroidery samplers furthers our understanding of the genre on its own and as a wider textile practices. Crossed Stitches is interested in the production, portability, circulation, and reception of embroidery samplers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using interdisciplinary methods influenced by literary criticism, Indigenous studies, and art history, it analyzes samplers created in three locations: British, American, and Native American homes; Native American missionary schools; and British psychiatric asylums. With attention to samplers’ material form and textual content, these analyses explore how girls and women adapted a traditionally formulaic genre into individualized textile texts that meet their needs for self-expression, literary engagement, and political critique. Despite being created in starkly different environments, the samplers discussed in this dissertation share a common ability to communicate ideas that were important to their makers. In domestic spaces, samplers echo the structure and content of books and reflect their makers’ reading habits. In missionary schools, samplers with conventional designs but complex messages demonstrate a contact point between Native American and Euro-American cultural practices and samplers’ decolonial potential. In psychiatric asylums, samplers that were reinvented as diaries, letters, and legal documents further each stitcher’s legal claims and (dis)connect her from other women. Crossed Stitches positions embroidery samplers as a flexible communication medium that facilitated local and global networks of exchange between girls and women who sewed and the broader publics who viewed their works.

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