Graduate Student Research Fellows

Fall 2024 Graduate Student Research Fellow

Sasha Krongos
M.A. Candidate, Historical Studies

Project: Gender, Labor, and Home-Design in American Magazines from 1890-1920

Sasha Krongos will be researching popular printed material, including women’s magazines, ‘shelter’ magazines, and model home catalogs to examine their treatment of women’s participation in home-building and home-design between the years 1890 and 1920. Krongos will be studying this topic to find out what influence this printed media had on the reformation of the domestic sphere, and the extent to which women’s participation as both consumers and producers of their built environment may have manifested in the physical and social world. She sees her research as being a hybrid between social, material, and architectural studies; an exploration of the intersection of evolving gender dynamics, consumerism, and architectural practices during the coinciding national movements of the American building boom and the women’s rights movement. As a humanities-focused study, this work will synthesize crucial events and concepts from the American Progressive Era, including dominant domestic and feminist ideologies, the popularizing notion of domestic reform, the social influences of architecture, building practices, and settlement patterns, and the ubiquity and impact of the American magazine and a growing consumer culture.