UNT CVAD Professor Publishes an Anthology of Craft and War

Jennifer Way, Ph.D., professor of Art History in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas, has published "Craft and War: Makers, Users, and Craft Practices since the 19th Century" with Bloomsbury Publishing.

The anthology emerged from a session Way organized for the 2020 annual conference of the Association of Art Historians and responds to a gap she identified while completing her earlier monograph, "Politics of Vietnamese Craft: American Diplomacy and Domestication." In that work, she encountered limited sustained scholarship on the entanglements of craft and conflict — a gap this volume directly addresses.

Spanning the mid-19th century to the present, "Craft and War" brings together essays that consider craft not as peripheral to conflict, but as materially and socially embedded within it. Across 16 chapters, contributors examine practices of making, circulation and use, situating objects within conditions of war, displacement and recovery.

Organized into six thematic sections — Reviving Presence, Making Do, Craft in Displacement, Organizing Women, Craft and Healing, and Politics of Friendship — the volume invites comparative readings across geographies, temporalities and cultural contexts. Rather than isolating national traditions, the essays trace transnational connections linking sites as varied as South Africa and Scotland, Canada and Japan, and Lebanon and the Lebanese-Syrian border. 

A central intervention of the anthology is its challenge to familiar art historical binaries: domestic versus public, civilian versus military, home front versus battlefield. The essays also push against a canon that privileges peacetime production and compartmentalizes craft into prewar and postwar categories. In doing so, the volume aligns craft studies more closely with adjacent fields, including conflict and war studies, material culture and decolonial scholarship.

Importantly, the contributors foreground makers and users of color, shifting attention away from narratives centered on imperial and colonial actors. Their work underscores how craft operates within — and often resists — structures of power, while also serving as a site of care, adaptation and social connection.

Methodologically, the volume reflects the field’s ongoing expansion. Essays draw on approaches ranging from intersectional gender analysis and Indigenous studies to ecocriticism, peace studies and theories of subjectivity, situating craft within multiple, overlapping histories.

The project was supported by the College of Visual Arts and Design through a Cornerstone Grant for full-color image publication and indexing, as well as a Small Grant to fund image rights for one chapter. Way also mentored two doctoral students involved in the original conference session, who contributed to the volume through peer review and image rights research.

"Craft and War" is available through Bloomsbury Publishing, major booksellers and academic library platforms.

For students interested in studying art history at a place where research actively shapes the field, UNT CVAD offers opportunities to engage directly with faculty scholarship, interdisciplinary inquiry and global perspectives. The Department of Art History prepares students to think critically about visual culture while contributing to conversations that extend far beyond the classroom.