Program

Henry Luce Foundation/ ACLS Program in China Studies Postdoctoral Fellowships, 2016

Project

Embroidered Figures: Commerce and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Women’s Fashions

Department

History of Art and Visual Culture

Abstract

The Luce/ACLS China Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship will be spent writing my book, Embroidered Figures: Commerce and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Women’s Fashions. The book is based on my DPhil dissertation (University of Oxford, 2014) but will be augmented through research in museums, archives, and libraries in Suzhou, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The book uses collections of Chinese women’s dress and accessories to tell a new story about women as consumers and producers in nineteenth-century China. It is a history of how the commercialisation of textile handicrafts and the flourishing of urban popular culture transformed Qing women’s engagement with fashionable dress.

Program

Luce/ACLS Travel Grants in China Studies, 2025

Project

Feather Satins and Orangutan Felts: A Material History of English Woolens in Qing China

Abstract

“Feather Satins and Orangutan Felts” examines the East India Company’s—EIC—export of English woolens to China during the Canton trade era, ca. 1757 to 1834. At the intersection of material culture studies and socio-economic history, this book challenges the notion that Qing consumers shunned foreign goods, provides important new data and analysis on Qing textile markets and consumption, and brings humanistic perspectives to ongoing debates around the role of textiles in the Qing economy.