Chloe Chapin | artist/academic
Chloe Chapin is an artist/academic, working through scholarship, teaching, and practice to bridge the gap between thinking and doing.
Chloe received her PhD in American Studies from Harvard University in 2023. She also holds an MFA in Design from the Yale School of Drama and an MA in Fashion and Textile Studies from the Fashion Institute of Technology. At Harvard she also received an AM in History and dual secondary concentrations in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and in Archaeology. Her research sits at the crossroads of history, gender studies, and material culture.
Before going back to graduate school, Chloe spent over a decade as a professional costume designer in New York City. Credits include: Broadway (Assoc/Asst: Equus, American Idiot, HAIR!, Passing Strange, The Columnist), NYC (BAM, The Civilians, Rattlestick, Culture Project, Clubbed Thumb); Regional (Hartford Stage, Yale Rep, Two River, Empty Space), Educational (Princeton, Reed College, MIT). She also tried being a painter for a minute.
Chloe has taught at FIT, Parsons, Reed College, Tufts University's X-College, Harvard College, and the Summer Pre-College Program at Harvard, where she teaches courses in Gender Studies and Anthropology, one of which is called "The Intellectual Economy of Pants." In the Spring of 2024, she is teaching a class through the Harvard Extension School: “I, Us, Them: How Clothing Creates Individuals, Communities, and Enemies.”
Chloe has been a MacDowell Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar, and her research has been supported by grants from the Weatherhead Institute of Gender Inequality, American Scandinavian Foundation, and through research fellowships at Monticello, Mount Vernon, the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Winterthur Museum, Gardens, and Library. In 2022-2023, she was the Interdisciplinary Dissertation Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, and in 2021-2022, she was the Joe & Wanda Corn dissertation fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of American History.
Chloe is at work translating her dissertation into a book manuscript: “Suits: the Founding Fathers, the Industries of America, and the Making of Modern Men.” In this project, she looks at the history of men’s suits as a way to examine relationships between sartorial conformity and masculine power.
In her day job, Chloe is the Assistant Director of Course Development at the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University.
Translating this bio into plain English, Chloe has navigated the transition from thinking and learning and making like an artist to thinking and teaching and writing like an academic.
Her academic journey has not just included but been focused in spaces where she was the only one who didn’t fit in intellectually, who didn’t speak the language or understand the disciplinary conventions or methodologies (or, at first, what those things even meant). Her multi-disciplinary training makes her a particularly flexible thinker for an academic, with an awareness of how field-specific methods can both help and hinder knowledge production.
She has a strong record of receiving grants and research fellowships, both from her local teaching institutions (FIT, Reed, Harvard) and from nationally and internationally recognized research funding bodies (Smithsonian, Fulbright, American Antiquarian Society). She has received several teaching awards and has worked as a consultant and coach for professors at top universities.
