David Jaffee Papers

David P. Jaffee (b. New York, 1954; d. New York, 2017) was a noted scholar in American material and visual culture, as well as in social, cultural, and colonial history. Throughout his career, he explored the uses of technology in teaching and research. He received his BA from Harvard University in 1976. He spent a year at Christ’s College at Cambridge University, and returned to Harvard for his doctoral work, writing a dissertation on the cultural geography of Early America under the supervision of Professor Bernard Bailyn. This was later published as the book People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630–1860. He was a historian at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, and taught at Georgetown University and Princeton University before being hired at The City College of New York in 1987. He taught there, and later at the Graduate Center, CUNY, until 2007. At the Graduate Center, he worked closely with the American Social History Project and the CUNY Interactive Technology and Pedagogy program. He was a Fulbright Professor in American Studies at the University of Tokyo, and would continue to return to lecture in Japan on American history and material culture during his career. David Jaffee began teaching at Bard Graduate Center in 2007. There, he was instrumental in founding the school’s Digital Media Lab in 2009, and in launching a curriculum in the material culture of New York City. His book A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America was published in 2010 and won the Fred Kniffen Book Prize of the Pioneer America Society. He also led the development of the influential National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute for College Teachers on American Material Culture, using New York City as its case study. This project was selected four times for funding by the NEH (in 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017), with David Jaffee serving as project director for the first three Institutes. During his time at Bard Graduate Center, he also curated two exhibitions in collaboration with MA and PhD students: Visualizing 19th-Century New York (Fall 2014) and New York Crystal Palace 1853 (Spring 2017). These follow exhibition work early in his career on 1992’s Meet Your Neighbors at Sturbridge Village.