Reading Craft: Exploring a Discipline Through the Texts That Have Shaped It

Online
July 1–29, 2026

Every discipline is formed, shaped, and re-formed by the texts that constitute its discourse. Craft history is still a nascent discipline, and the texts that describe its boundaries and centers are both significant and yet still hungry for better company. Each week in this course we will come together to discuss a few key texts—excerpts, essays, and short-form popular writing—that have in their own ways impacted craft history, give us something meaty to discuss, and point towards what might still be needed or what could come next. The course will require active participation from those in attendance and will be shaped much like a friendly, conversational, engaged book club.

Instructor Dr. Michelle Millar Fisher is the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Previously, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. Her work focuses on the intersections of people, power, and the material world. At the MFA, she is working on Craft Schools: Where We Make What We Inherit, which took her on a train journey across all 48 contiguous US states. She leads an independent team on a project called Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births. She holds an MA and an M.Phil in Art History from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and received an M.Phil and PhD from The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She publishes widely on art, design, and architecture.