Mary Cheek Mills has more than 20 years of experience as a glass historian and educator. She teaches European and American glass history at the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Sotheby’s Institute of Art and Winterthur Museum. As Historic Glass Specialist for the engineering firm AECOM in Burlington, New Jersey, Mills assists with archaeological research related to the early glass industry in Philadelphia. 


Join us for Mills’s lecture, Rediscovering a Lost Industry: 19th-Century Glassmaking on Philadelphia’s Waterfront, and learn how the I-95 Girard Avenue Interchange Improvement Project’s archaeological investigations conducted by AECOM are yielding extraordinary glass artifacts—from free-blown whimsies, to tableware, to lighting—that reveal how this material helped shape the identity of the city’s Fishtown neighborhood. 

Supported by the Laurie Wagman Fund in Glass Art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture.