William R. Scott
William R. Scott received his A.B. (with Honors) in History from Dartmouth College in 1992, after having grown up in Canada. He then taught history in public schools in Los Angeles and San Francisco for seven years. He earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in American History from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2007, he has taught classes in history, material culture, and social studies education at the University of Delaware. Professor Scott's current research focuses upon the transformation in men's style in the mid-twentieth century. Men replaced the three-piece suit, once a veritable male uniform, with leisurewear on many more occasions. He examines the causes and implications of this shift in vernacular style, which is connected to such divergent phenomena as the emergence of "lifestyle marketing," the development of modernist design principles, the rise of the mall, the ascension of consumerist masculinity, and the greater importance of leisure in American culture.
As a teacher and material culture scholar, he is concerned with the social lives of objects: examining things in their historical contexts, in order to answer questions seemingly unconnected to the world of objects.
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