The CMCS Advisory Committee offers guidance to the Directors on strategic planning and Center initiatives, and assists in the vetting process for CMCS grants. The members of the current Advisory Committee are: Petra Clark, Catharine Dann Roeber, Kedron Thomas, Jennifer Van Horn.
Petra Clark – Assistant Librarian and Instruction Librarian for Special Collections
Petra Clark is an Instruction Librarian for Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library, Museums & Press. Since starting this role in 2023, her work has largely encompassed teaching and outreach using the collections, curating exhibitions in the library, and providing reference and research support. She is one of the curators of the exhibition What They Saved: Souvenirs and Mementos in Special Collections, on view in the Special Collections Gallery for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Before becoming a library professional, Petra earned an MA and a PhD in English from the University of Delaware, with a focus on Victorian print, visual, and material culture. From 2011-2021, she taught undergraduate courses in composition, literature, and the liberal arts at UD, Rowan University, and the Delaware College of Art and Design (DCAD). Her scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Victorian Periodicals Review and the Journal of Victorian Culture, and most recently, in the edited collection Fashioning the Self: Identity and Style in British Culture (2023). As a graduate student, Petra was awarded DELPHI and Friends of Rockwood fellowships through CMCS and is delighted to now contribute to the Center’s work as a member of the advisory committee.
Mónica Domínguez Torres – Professor and Chair, Department of Art History
Mónica Domínguez Torres specializes in the arts of the early modern Iberian World, with particular interest in cross-cultural exchanges between Spain and the Americas during the period 1500-1700. She received a B.A. in Art History from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, a Masters in Museum Studies and a Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of Toronto, Canada. Since 2005, she holds a joint appointment in Latin American and Iberian Studies. She currently serves as Associate Director of UD’s Center for Material Culture Studies.
She is the author of Pearls for the Crown: Art, Nature, and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion (Penn State University Press, 2024), which analyzes a selection of objects and images connected to the Atlantic pearl industry in order to reveal the messages they articulate about imperial expansion, providential wealth, racial hierarchies, and human mastery over nature. This book received Honorable Mention from the 2025 Eleanor Tufts Award of The Society for Iberian Global Art, and funding support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Getty Research Institute, Renaissance Society of America, and Newberry Library, among others. She has published various essays based on this research, including “Pearl Fishing in the Caribbean: Early Images of Slavery and Forced Migration in the Americas” in African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States, edited by Persephone Braham (University of Delaware Press, 2015); “Nel piu ricco paese del Mondo: Cubagua Island as an Epicenter of the Early Atlantic Trade” in Circulación: Movement of Ideas, Art and People in Spanish America, edited by Jorge Rivas (Denver: Frederick & Jan Mayer Center, Denver Art Museum, 2018); “Mastery, Artifice, and the Natural Order: A Jewel from the Early Modern Pearl Industry” in The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Cultures Studies, edited by Ivan Gaskell and Sarah A. Carter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); and “Pearls for the King: Philip II and the New World Pearl Industry” in Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective, edited by Karl Kusserow (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 2021).
Kedron Thomas – Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Kedron Thomas, Anthropology.
Kedron Thomas, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. She is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in textiles, clothing, and fashion, especially the diversity of what people wear and how it is made. Her first book, Regulating Style: Intellectual Property Law and the Business of Fashion in Guatemala (University of California Press, 2016), is based on long-term research with Indigenous Maya apparel manufacturers who make clothing that features unauthorized reproductions of fashion brands. She examines the rise of “knockoff” fashion in Central America amidst the politics of race and indigeneity, efforts by the Guatemalan state and international institutions to promote entrepreneurship and national development after nearly four decades of armed conflict, and the globalization of intellectual property regimes that criminalize practices of brand “piracy.” Her current book project describes the politics of environmental sustainability and labor rights from the perspectives of designers, marketers, and brand and supply chain managers at fashion and footwear firms in cities across the US and UK. Tentatively titled, Sustainability in the Making: Labor, Ethics, and Ecology in the Global Fashion Industry, the book narrates how fashion professionals are attempting to build more environmentally sustainable and ethical supply chains.
Thomas earned a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University in 2012. Before joining the University of Delaware, she was associate professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.
Jennifer Van Horn – Associate Professor, Departments of Art History and History
Jennifer Van Horn is an Assistant Professor of Art History and History at the University of Delaware. She teaches courses in American art, material culture, and museum studies. Her research interests range from George Washington’s dentures, to women’s embroidery, to wooden legs. Her current book project, Resisting the Art of Enslavement: Slavery and Portraiture in American Art, examines the connections between enslavement and portrait making and viewing in the 18th and 19th century plantation South. She has recently held senior fellowships at the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum and at CASVA (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts) at the National Gallery of Art. She is the author of The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (Chapel Hill, 2017) which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize, and received an honorable mention for the Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has published articles in Art Bulletin, American Art, Early American Studies, and Winterthur Portfolio.
Professor Van Horn earned her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Delaware. A graduate of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, she worked on the curatorial staff at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and taught at George Mason University and the Corcoran’s MA Program in the History of Decorative Arts, before returning to the University of Delaware.