Regina Lee Blaszczyk

Regina Lee Blaszczyk is an independent scholar affiliated with the department of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on the history of consumer society, design and fashion, and corporate innovation. She has taught at Boston University, Rutgers University-Camden, and the University of Pennsylvania, and was cultural history curator at the Smithsonian Institution. She is author of the award-winning Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (2002), Major Problems in American Business History (2006), Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers (2008), and American Consumer Society, 1865-2005: From Hearth to HDTV (2009), among other books. In 2008, she received the Harold F. Williamson Prize for mid-career achievement from the Business History Conference.

Lecture topics:

• American Consumer Society from Hearth to HDTV
• Dressing America: How Americans Invented Mass-Market Fashion
• Shop America! Woolworth's to Wal-Mart
• Women in Business: Catherine Beecher to Oprah Winfrey
• Putting Business and the Economy Back into American History
• Madison Avenue Gets Motivated: Ernest Dichter and Postwar Consumer Culture

Viewed Saturday, November 21, 2009