Specialization
Historical archaeology, US urban archaeology (19th- and 20th- century Chicago), modern and contemporary material culture, world’s fairs and expositions, architecture and the built environment, consumerism and consumption, historic preservation, museums and collecting practices, politics of heritage
Education
PhD University of Chicago (2011)MA University of Chicago (2001)BA University of California, Berkeley (1999)
Research Interests
Rebecca S. Graff is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lake Forest College (PhD and MA, University of Chicago; BA, University of California, Berkeley). As an historical archaeologist with research interests in the 19th- and 20th-century urban United States, she explores the relationship between temporality and modernity, memory and material culture, and contemporary heritage and nostalgic consumption through archaeological and archival research. Her book, Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism During Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair (2020) was based on an archaeological and archival project focusing on the ephemeral “White City” and Midway Plaisance of the 1893 Chicago Fair and the modern disposal practices seen at the Louis Sullivan-designed Charnley-Persky House. In Chicago, Graff has also excavated the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument (2016), the Gray-Cloud House (2018), Mecca Flats (2018), Armour Mission and Armour Flats (2023), and the Edith Farnsworth House (2021, 2024). In 2019, she led excavations at the former site of the African Methodist Episcopal Church on the campus of Lake Forest College.
Graff’s work has been supported by the American Historical Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities (SHARP), the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture (University of Chicago), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance. In 2013, she won the Kathleen Kirk Gilmore Dissertation Award from the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA), presented to a recent graduate whose dissertation is considered to be an outstanding contribution to historical archaeology. At the University of Chicago, she taught undergraduate and graduate students as a preceptor and postdoctoral instructor in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS). She returned to Chicagoland in 2014 from a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Michigan Technological University’s Department of Social Sciences. In Chicago, Graff directed and co-directed archaeological undergraduate field schools for DePaul University, the University of Chicago, Michigan Technological University, and Lake Forest College. Her research has been published in Historical Archaeology, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, Current Anthropology, and in edited volumes from presses including Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press.
