Since 2007, Karin J. Bohleke has served as the director of the Fashion Archives and Museum of Shippensburg University and also teaches in the Applied History Master’s Degree program. She holds a Ph.D. in French language and literature from Yale University, and serves as an assistant adjunct professor of French at Dickinson College.
An avid seamstress, embroiderer, and lace-maker since childhood, she augmented her studies of vintage clothing styles by creating highly accurate reproduction clothing when introduced to vintage social dancing by her husband. They also teach Civil War and historic social dancing, proctor balls, and lecture and perform. Together they collect vintage clothing, fashion magazines in French and English, cased images, cartes de visite, cabinet cards, and dance-related paper ephemera and use their resources to teach others about American material culture.
Karin resides near Gettysburg, PA, and continues to pursue her interests in historic fashions, needle arts, languages, social dance, and nineteenth-century women’s travel accounts. She is also a member of the Costume Society of America. Karin has assisted in the identification and dating of nineteenth-century photographs and evaluated and dated the costume collections for many institutions. She has presented her continuing research at annual symposia of the Costume Society of America as well as published articles in Dress, Costume, The Daguerreian Annual, American Periodicals, Civil War Historian, and Piecework.
Her research interests focus on the nineteenth century and include fashion, early photography, pre-Tutankhamun Egyptomania fashions for women, the dissemination of French fashions in the United States, and women’s travel accounts of journeys to Egypt. Her current research project involves the study of clothing in photographs of African Americans, 1840-1920.
Dr. Bohleke is an engaging and popular speaker and lectures on a wide variety of topics. She welcomes future speaking opportunities.
“Our Patterns Can Be Used For All Sizes”: French Miniature Pattern Drafts, 1830s-1840s. Forthcoming in Sewn in America: Making, Meaning, Memory, forthcoming catalog for an exhibit under the same name at the DAR Museum, Washington, DC, opening in March 2024.
“The Vanderbilt Pillow: The Lure of Old Lace.” Piecework Magazine. 31, no. 3 (Fall 2023): 17-21.
“Swiss Embroidery: A Forgotten Lace Technique.” Piecework Magazine 31, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 19-23.
“Sewing to Survive: Lillian Drum’s WPA Sampler Book.” Piecework Magazine 31, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 58-61.
“Wavy Braid Trim: Pretty and Practical.” Piecework Magazine (Summer 2022): 48-51.
“Reading Textiles as Text: Katharina von Bora’s Self-Representation through Dress.” Women Reformers in Early Modern Europe: Profiles, Texts, and Contexts. Edited by Kirsi I. Stjerna. 301-311. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press/Media 1517, 2022.
“Victorian Ticking Embroidery: Sewing Along the Lines.” Piecework Magazine (Fall 2021): 56-60. Co-author: Colleen Formby.
“ʻHe Would Have Been Burned as a Sorcerer”: Daguerre’s Work Viewed Through Adolescent Eyes.” Daguerreian Annual (2019): 44-47.
“The Sterb-Spiegel: A Fashionable Eighteenth-Century Dance of Death.” Costume 52:2 (September 2018): 188-216.
“Identifying Stages of Grief in Nineteenth-Century Images.” The Daguerreian Annual (2015): 166-191. Available at Academia.edu.
“It Was Not Supposed To Turn Out This Way: Sewing and Fitting Errors as Indicators of Social Class.” The Daguerreian Annual (2015): 92-109. Available at Academia.edu.
“The Mourning After: Grieving in Style in the Nineteenth Century.” MdHS News (Summer 2015): 6-9.
“Put on your Polka; It’s Cold Outside.” Daguerreian Annual (2014): 238-251. Available at Academia.edu.
“Assimilation, Amalgamation and Defiance: The `Admirable Figure of the Negro’ and African American Dress in Daguerreotypes and Early Photographs.” Daguerreian Annual (2014): 10-33. Available at Academia.edu.
“Mummies are Called Upon to Contribute to Fashion: Pre-Tutankhamun Egyptian Revivalism in Dress.”
Dress vol. 40, no. 2 (2014): 95-115.
“My Grandmother’s Brooch.” The Daguerreian Annual (2013): 92-97. Available at Academia.edu.
“`Une dame européenne qui voyage en homme:” Ida Saint-Elme and Dress Across Borders,
Cultures and Religion.” Shippensburg Journal of Modern Languages. Issue 2 (Fall 2011): 7-14.
“Nile Style: Nineteenth-Century Women Travelers in Egypt and the Dilemma of Dress, 1815-1875.”
Dress 36 (2010): 63-86.
“Americanizing French Fashion Plates: Godey’s and Peterson’s Cultural and Socio-Economic
Translation of Les Modes Parisiennes.” American Periodicals 20:2 (2010): 120-155.
“Mary Ellen’s Apron; or, Patriotism to the Fore,” Civil War Historian 1:3 (May/June 2005): 52-62. Available at Academia.edu.
“Green Practices in Historic Clothing.” Phillips Museum, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA (February 22, 2024).
“Nineteenth-Century Black Fashion History Through Photographs.” Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, PA, (March 16, 2023) and Shippensburg University (March 20, 2023).
“Black Fashion History in Maine: Examining the Clothing in Nineteenth-Century Photographs.” Maine Historical Society (Portland, ME) (August 9, 2022).
“Ticking, Wavy Braid, Guipure, and Other Forgotten Needlework Techniques.” Schwenkfelder Library and Heritage Center Penn Goods Dry Market (Pennsburg, PA) (June 4, 2022).
“Dress, Modernity, and the Printing Press: Interpreting Fashion in Early Sixteenth-Century Reformation Pamphlets” presented with Annika Dowd at Costume Across the Curriculum and into the Community joint regional symposium sponsored by Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the Costume Society of America, Shippensburg, PA, October 11-13, 2018.
“The Past as it Seamed”: Three Centuries of Women in the Fashion Business—Dorothy Speckhardt, Rose Bertin, and Salome Myers Stewart” presented with Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Jane Malcolm-Davies, Christina Westenberger, and Janea Whitacre at Making Connections: Manufacturing Knowledge through Dress Studies symposium sponsored by the Costume Society of America, Colonial Williamsburg, VA, March 12-17, 2018.
“Conserving and Recreating the Costumes of Jeannie Gourlay: The Milkmaid in Our American Cousin, Ford’s Theatre, April 14, 1865.” Presented with Colleen Callahan at For the Love of Costume annual symposium of the Southeastern Region of the Costume Society of America, Winchester, VA, September 18-October 31, 2017.
“Caring for your Family Heirloom Textiles” Renfrew Museum, Waynesboro, PA, May 23, 2017.
“The Sterb-Spiegel: A Fashionable Eighteenth-Century Dance of Death” Presented at The Full Cleveland: Dress as Communication, Self-Expression and Identity symposium sponsored by the Costume Society of America, Cleveland, OH, May 24-29, 2016.
“Clothed and in Their Own Form: African American Women and Fashionable Dress in Early Photographs” Presented at Transnational Perspectives on Immigration/Emigration in Literature, Linguistics, Culture, Education and Sciences: Sixth Biennial Modern Languages Conference at Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA, April 30-May 1, 2016.
“Foreign Origins: African-American Women and Contemporary Fashions in Early Photographs” Presented at “Fabricating Truths: African-American Women and Clothing in the Nineteenth Century” panel at Unsettling conference sponsored by C19: The Society for Nineteenth-Century Americanists, State College, PA, March 17-20, 2016.
