Joseph Zordan

What do we make of our grief? “Tangible Sorrows: The Materiality and Heritage of Grief in Colonial New York, 1688-1764” examines how various social groups employed art and architecture to make sense of death within the novel and unstable conditions of colonialism. With experiences of loss as varied as the population within the diverse colony of New York, this project will look toward a range of objects such as decorative arts, painting, gravestones, along with other works from diplomatic, domestic, and ecclesiastical settings which were enlisted within the processes of mourning and remembrance. In bringing together such objects and identities into the same field of analysis, I will demonstrate how the affectual experiences and material expressions of grief made under the conditions of colonialism engendered complex afterlives which reproduced or threatened the stability of the colonial project itself during the eighteenth century.