I’ve been thinking lately about all the work that happens before the work.
Not the publication, presentation, article, or lecture.
The notes.
The questions.
The half-filled notebooks and marked-up photocopies. The folders that begin with one research question and end somewhere entirely unexpected. The archive visits that produce more uncertainty than answers. The objects that linger in the back of my mind long after I’ve returned them to a box, a drawer, a shelf, or a garment rack.
For years, much of my work has centered on understanding how people use objects—particularly clothing—to remember, communicate, inherit, preserve, and reinvent aspects of themselves. Through Real People, Real Clothes, I’ve developed a platform to prospectively share many of those stories: garments as family archives, inherited objects as vessels of memory, and the ways ordinary things acquire extraordinary meaning over time.
But what often remains unseen is the process.
The reality is that my days are rarely devoted to a single project. Instead, I move between archives, classrooms, collections, manuscripts, conference papers, research appointments, freelance projects, and writing deadlines. One day I might be tracing the biography of a garment through family photographs; the next, revising a lecture I’ve taught for years because a new group of students has prompted me to see the material differently.
Research rarely unfolds in a straight line.
It is accumulative. Recursive. Sometimes frustrating. Often surprising.
A chance conversation at a conference becomes a future collaboration. An overlooked footnote becomes a chapter. A student question reshapes a lecture. A garment, photograph, or document reveals a story I wasn’t looking for but suddenly can’t stop thinking about.
I’ve come to realize that some of the most meaningful parts of this work happen in those in-between spaces—the moments before conclusions are reached and before ideas are polished into finished forms.
So I’m considering creating a new space here: a living record of research in progress.
Not polished essays, but field notes.
Not conclusions, but investigations.
A place to share discoveries, challenges, methods, teaching reflections, archival encounters, and the often invisible labor behind historical research and material culture scholarship.
In many ways, this feels like opening the notebook itself.
If Real People, Real Clothes is where I share stories once they’ve taken shape, The Materialist’s Notebook would be where readers can follow the process of shaping them.
I’d love to know whether that’s something you’d be interested in reading.
What parts of the work would you like to see more of? Cast your vote below and let me know.
Archival research and methods
Behind-the-scenes of freelance archival projects
How lectures and courses are built and updated
Conference and publication preparation
Research challenges and problem-solving
Material culture analysis in practice
The realities of balancing scholarship, teaching, and contract work