Madeline Porsella

Madeline Porsella studies the history of design, architecture, and fashion in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Her primary focus is on the incorporation of new technologies into the built environment with particular interest in the ways science and the occult coalesced in fin-de-siècle interior design. Further research interests include theories of ornament, collective memory, and alternative modernisms. 

She received her undergraduate degree from Bard College and her M.A. in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center where her qualifying paper, “The New Promethean: Modernism and the Occult in Claude Bragdon’s Projective Ornament” was awarded the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts Award. Her article, “Electric Lady Liberty: Alice Vanderbilt’s Self-Fashioning through Fancy Dress” appears in Dress in Fall 2023. In addition to her research, Madeline co-founded Mandylion Press, publishing obscure and overlooked literature from the long nineteenth century.