The public is invited to attend the Newport Historical Society’s annual meeting on Thursday, September 22 at 4:30pm at the Colony House on Washington Square. Special guest speaker Nicole Belolan will present “Dismembered Memory: Desire Tripp and Her Arm’s Gravestone.” The annual meeting will include a review of the Society’s accomplishments in the last fiscal year (July 2010 through June 2011) and will be concluded with a reception.
Nicole Belolan and the 1786 gravestone of Desire Tripp's Arm
Nicole Belolan, the 2011 Buchanan/Burnham Fellow, will discuss her research about a gravestone in the Common Burying Ground. A marker dated February 1786 in Newport’s Common Burying Ground commemorates the amputation by a Newport physician of a woman’s arm. From a variety of sources, Belolan will reconstruct Desire Tripp’s life in late 18th century Newport, and discuss this unusual commemoration.
A Ph.D. candidate in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware, Nicole Belolan studies eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American cultural and social history. Nicole graduated from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. She earned a B.A. in American Studies from The Pennsylvania State University (2007) and she has worked at Winterthur Museum cataloguing furnishing textiles. Her research and professional interests include the intersection of material culture and changes in the body in everyday life, print culture, the history of collecting, textiles and needlework, and public history.
Reservations requested; persons with mobility issues should call in advance, 401-841-8770.