Stephanie Amerian
Ph.D. History, UCLA, 2011
C.Phil. History, 2008
M.A. History, UCLA, 2007
B.A. History, UC-Berkeley, 2004
Fax: 310-206-7833
E-mail:
samerian@ucla.edu
Field
U.S. History, Consumerism, Gender history, Women in business, Cold War, Cultural History, Fashion history
Research Interests
Dissertation: "Fashioning a Female Executive: Dorothy Shaver and the Business of American Style, 1893-1959"
?Fashioning a Female Executive? examines the career of Dorothy Shaver, the President of Lord & Taylor department store in New York City from 1945-1959 and the first woman before the 1980s to work her way up the corporate ladder at a major firm. This dissertation argues that Shaver?s unique success stemmed from her ability to marshal her cultural capital in the form of art, fashion, and design expertise, and her social capital with the design community, professional women, businessmen, and government leaders to create a unique ?personality? for Lord & Taylor, as both a fashion leader and an engaged citizen. In addition to being an early advocate for American fashion and design, Shaver was a top midcentury businesswomen embedded in the larger New York business world with wide-ranging social, political, and cultural interests. She forged connections with other fashion women as a founder of The Fashion Group and had the support of important businessmen including Lord & Taylor?s President, Samuel W. Reyburn, and IBM?s CEO, Thomas J. Watson, Sr. By the end of her life, Shaver had established herself in many exclusive ?clubs? that included powerful New Yorkers, such as the Board of Trustees at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Committee for Economic Development, the vanguard of business liberals.
Publications
Review: Brent Shannon, The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in
Britain, 1860-1914, Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History (March 2010).
Education Research Study: Silk, Y., Silver, D., Amerian, S., Nishimura, C., Boscardin, C.K. (2009). Using Classroom Artifacts to Measure the Efficacy of Professional Development. CRESST Report 761. National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST). University of California, Los Angeles. http://www.cse.ucla.edu/products/reports/R761.pdf
Grants and Awards
Mary Wollstonecraft Dissertation Award, Center for the Study of Women, UCLA, 2011
UCLA Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship, 2010-2011
Appleby Memorial Pre-Dissertation Fellowship, 2008-2009
UCLA Graduate Division Student Summer Research Mentorship, 2007
Carey McWilliams History Department Research Travel Grant, Fall 2008
UCLA Center for the Study of Women Travel Grant, Fall 2008
Advisors
Jan Reiff, chair
Kathryn Norberg
Ellen Dubois
Eleanor Kaufman (Comparative Literature)
Conference Presentations
? ?No. 1 Career Woman?: Dorothy Shaver, Femininity, and Feminism in 1930s and 1940s New York,? Paper presented at 2011 Conference of the Western Association of Women Historians, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (April 2011).
?Fighting Communism with Clothes: Cold War Fashion and American Consumerism, 1945-1959,? Paper presented at Cold War Cultures: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, University of Texas at Austin, (October 2010).
?The Art of Selling Style at Lord & Taylor, 1924-1945,? Paper presented at Distribution Networks for Textiles and Dress, c. 1700-1945, Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution, University of Wolverhampton, UK (September 2010).
Edit This Page