The Department of Art Conservation is pleased to announce that Madeline (Maddie) Hagerman will begin her tenure as a continuing-track Assistant Professor effective September 1, 2022.
In this capacity, she will focus primarily on undergraduate teaching and mentoring and departmental or university service centered on strengthening undergraduate recruitment, diversity, and retention, curriculum review, preservation outreach and advocacy, and community engagement initiatives.
Maddie is currently an Instructor in our department, primarily focused on teaching undergrads. Before transitioning to UD full-time in 2019, she served as Assistant Objects Conservator and Affiliated Assistant Professor at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library (2018-2019), splitting her time between Winterthur and teaching undergraduate courses at UD.
Maddie received her B.A. in history and anthropology with minors in European studies and material culture studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her M.A. in Principles of Conservation and her M.Sc. in Conservation for Archaeology and Museums from University College London, where she also served as a teaching assistant. As part of her graduate training, she spent a year working in the British Museum’s Ceramics, Glass, and Metals Conservation Laboratory and completed conservation internships at the Natural History Museum, the Institute of Archaeology Collections, and UCL's NASA Regional Planetary Images Facility. She completed a two-year (2016-2018) postgraduate fellowship in objects conservation at Winterthur, researching and treating Delft tiles in the collection. During her fellowship, she taught an undergraduate internship in ceramics conservation in 2017 and was hooked!
Maddie’s research interests include conservation ethics, inorganic objects conservation, collections care, and the history of conservation. She will be presenting a paper about the history of UD's undergraduate program and participating in a panel discussion about conservation education as well a poster at this year's AIC Conference. Her work also focuses on expanding access to conservation using social media and coordinating outreach events. She serves as Assistant Coordinating Officer for the ICOM-CC Education and Training in Conservation Working Group and will be starting a PhD in Preservation Studies in the fall centered on the evolution of conservation education.
Maddie brings to our department years of teaching experience, a sustained commitment to student success, vast social media and design skills, and a passion for engaging students, alums, and other communities in the preservation of cultural heritage. We all look forward to working with and learning from Maddie in the years ahead.
