This week on our Curious Objects podcast, host Benjamin Miller is joined by Marina Wells to discuss scrimshaw. Whalebone, teeth, and other products of the sea adorned with nautical scenes and remembrances of home, scrimshaw is a portal into the lives and daydreams of whalers confined for months at a time aboard bobbing, blood-and-blubber-spattered boats. Under discussion in this episode are a pair of sperm whale teeth bearing depictions of what look like female pirates.
Marina Dawn Wells has been a fellow at such institutions as the Winterthur Museum, Mystic Seaport Museum, and Nantucket Historical Association, and is currently the Photography Collection Curatorial Fellow at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, and will join the the museum as Assistant Curator of History and Culture this summer. Marina holds a PhD in American and New England Studies from Boston University, and a BA from Colby College in art history and English literature. Marina’s interests include gender and sexuality, oceanic studies, and nineteenth-century American art, which influences the current research project, “Making Men from Whales: Whaling Art and Gender in New England, 1814–1861.”
