AAHD Professor and Museum Curator Honored by American Folklore Society
MacDowell is the Curator of Folk Arts and Quilt Studies at the MSU Museum. Her research interests include South African quiltmaking; traditions of patchwork covers in China; quilts and health; the history and meaning of lau hala in Hawaiian cultural history; folk arts, social justice, and education; and the intersection of ethnography and museums in a digital age. She is the Director of the award-winning Quilt Index, a digital repository of stories, images, and other data related to quilts around the world, a project of MSU’s Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences.