George Schwartz, Curator-at-Large

George Schwartz has worked on many successful PEM exhibitions and installations, including curating Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums and co-curating the upcoming bicentennial installation in the museum's historic East India Marine Hall, among others. His specialty and interests are in maritime art, material culture, early collecting and museum history.

Schwartz earned his B.A. in Anthropology from Brown University, his M.A. in Historical Archaeology from UMASS Boston and his Ph.D. in American and New England Studies from Boston University. He is the editor and lead author of Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums (Rizzoli Electa, 2024), which was the gold winner for Foreword Reviews’ 2024 Indie Book of the Year Awards in the Popular Culture category. He is also the author of Collecting the Globe: The Salem East India Marine Society Museum (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), which explores PEM’s origins and illustrates how global objects were used to shape an emerging national identity in the early United States. Schwartz has lectured internationally and has written articles and essays for museum catalogues, journals, and magazines. He is an honorary member of the Salem Marine Society, and also teaches a course on material culture at Tufts University in the Museum Studies program.