Wendy A. Woloson

Wendy A. Woloson is an American historian. She is a professor at Rutgers University–Camden, specializing in the "history of material and consumer culture, used goods markets, alternative and criminal economies, and the history of capitalism".

Education

Woloson graduated from Iowa State University in 1986 with a BFA in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking and a minor in art history. In 1990, she received an MFA in Printmaking from Montana State University. In 1993, she received a MA in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University. Her thesis was titled "In Our Homes We Must Have Industry and Sympathy: Early Twentieth-Century Advertising Recipe Booklets and American Domestic Culture". In 1999, she received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation was "Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America" which she later published as a book in 2002.

Career

For ten years, Woloson worked as the Curator of Printed Books at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

She has been a professor at Rutgers University–Camden since 2013.

Awards and honors

Her book Crap: A History of Cheap Goods in America was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Books

• Refined Tastes Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
• In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
• Crap: A History of Cheap Goods in America (University of Chicago Press, 2020)

Editor

• coeditor with Brian P. Luskey of the collection, Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of 19th-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

External links

• Repository of Useful Knowledge | "The Repo": reclaiming the past for the digital age