Ann Smart Martin, Ph.D.
Chipstone Professor of History Emerita | University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ann Smart Martin is the Stanley and Polly Stone (Chipstone) Professor Emeriti in the Art History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she founded the university’s interdisciplinary material culture program. Her book Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Johns Hopkins, 2008) won best book prizes in both material culture and business history. Her current digital humanities project centers on the merchant William Ramsay’s 1753-56 Alexandria, Virginia store. She first analyzed Ramsay’s business as part of the of Smithsonian Museum of American History’s permanent exhibition American Enterprise (2016). Ramsay’s entire 900-page ledger is now digitized and a visual dictionary of the store’s retail goods is nearing completion. Her book in-progress Before the Light Bulb: A Material Culture of Lighting in American Homes analyzes how light was created, augmented, experienced and ultimately transformed in America in the two centuries before electricity.