Publication Type: Abstract Proposal
Abstract: In 1979, the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY acquired a four centimeter high solid glass head of an Egyptian king (79.1.4). The piece was first published by Sidney M. Goldstein in 1979, but since then it has not been studied in depth. This paper examines the physical properties of the glass head and attempts to identify the king portrayed. The paper also aims to draw attention to not only this particular piece, but to New Kingdom glass sculpture in general.

Glass sculpture was extremely rare in ancient Egypt. The glass head from the Corning Museum of Glass is one of only a handful of known examples of glass sculpture in the round from the New Kingdom. This particular piece, like the other examples of glass sculpture, would have been produced using lost wax casting, a technique borrowed from metalworking. The head was originally part of a larger figure, and has been broken away from the body at the base of the neck. The nemes headdress, uraeus, and false beard indicate this is definitely the head of a pharaoh. Based on the angle of the head in relation to the neck, it is certain this head was not part of a sphinx or a shawabti. It could have been part of a standing statue, but most likely it was a kneeling figure of a pharaoh.

The head is covered by a compact buff colored weathering product which is three to four millimeters thick. Overtime, glass is susceptible to a very slow chemical attack by liquid and atmospheric water. During this attack, alkalis leech out of the glass and silica is left in the form of weathering product. The weathering product is unusually thick for Egyptian glass and obscures the medium blue glass of the head. To conserve the piece, the weathering product was consolidated using silane and B-72.

Based on artistic style, the Corning head certainly dates to before Amenhotep III. It is important to note that this head was produced before the establishment of the major royal glass factories at Malqata, Amarna, and Qantir. The uraeus is unique in that it coils seven times over the top of the head, and this may help to date the piece. Based on the overall shape of the face and the representation of the eyes and mouth, the head mostly likely depicts Tuthmosis III or Amenhotep II.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines the extent and effects of occupational segregation in state bureaucracies by gender and race. It utilizes Lowi?s typology of departmental functions as expanded by Newman.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Sustained popular attention to the “glass ceiling” has inspired scholarly inquiries in two directions. One stream of research has investigated glass ceilings in organizations, while a second set of studies has assessed glass ceilings in occupations and entire societies. We contribute to the first line of work by conceptualizing organizational glass ceilings as barriers to women’s and minorities’ upward mobility within organizational hierarchies, and we provide evidence of glass ceilings in large U.S. law firms in the mid-1990s. As invisible barriers, glass ceilings are informal and limited to professional and managerial positions. Glass ceilings in organizations involve three distinct elements: (1) a demographic pattern in which women or minorities are fairly represented or even overrepresented at the entry level but underrepresented in policy-making positions; (2) a gender or race difference in promotion into top positions; and (3) evidence that the gender or race gap in promotion results primarily from the employer’s gender or racial bias. Using a sample of several hundred offices, we show that all three elements were pervasive among large U.S. law firms.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Scholars have often considered possession of a mirror in eighteenth and nineteenth century America to be a signifier of gentility, a clear statement on the part of its owner that he or she had both the resources to own a luxury item and the time to be concerned about personal appearance. In this sense, the mirror is one of many objects that proclaim to others who one is. But to its owner the mirror might be more than a mere signifier of status; it also provided opportunities for interaction between one’s self and the image of that self reflected in the looking glass. In this context, the mirror became a site of identity formation for early American men and women.

Mirrors became common items in American households during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period when men and women might still remember the first time they saw themselves in the mirror. The body was a central site of identity formation, to the extent that it revealed a person’s race, gender, class, and age. Adornments to that body—clothing, jewelry, makeup—could complicate or confirm what it revealed about identity and self. The proliferation of the mirror in early American society added to this process of identity formation a stable, yet ephemeral, image of self, body and its public and private adornments. The proposed paper focuses on the similarities and differences in the ways that eighteenth and nineteenth-century American women of African and European descent—enslaved and free, famous and forgotten, northern and southern—understood what their mirrors showed them about their race, class, and age and learned to trust, albeit often in contested fashion, what the mirror revealed to them about their identity as women.

The proposed paper begins with a brief consideration of patterns of ownership of looking glasses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as revealed in probate records. This analysis shows that despite the assumed link between gentility and looking glass ownership, Americans of all classes owned looking glasses, many of whom had no claim to gentility by any definition. The core of the paper draws on diaries, letters, slave narratives, and other sources to understand how the images these women saw reflected back to them in the mirror shaped and sometimes challenged their self conceptions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript