Conference on Dress, Clothing and Bodies
Dressing Global Bodies: Clothing Cultures, Politics and Economies in Globalizing Eras, c. 1600s-1900s
7-9 July 2016, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Co-Organized with the Pasold Research Fund, UK
Website: dressingglobalbodies.com
The clothes on our backs are intimately connected with bodily experiences, cultural, social and gender portrayals, as well as the economies of fashioning and re-fashioning across place and time. Garments reflect the priorities of local and international economies, collective and personal inclinations, religious norms and conversions. These materialities are shaped by global flows of cloth and beads, furs, ready-made and second-hand apparel, in dynamic processes of fashion exchange. Dress is a charged cultural instrument, as evident in colonial and decolonization processes, social and political agendas, animated by cross-cultural and commercial flows, industrial and institutional innovations.
This international conference will showcase new historical research on the centrality of dress in global, colonial and post-colonial engagements, emphasizing entangled histories, comparative and cross-cultural analyses. This scholarship redefines national and collective communities, in the practice of fashion and the dynamics of re-fashioning and re-use, from the seventeenth through the twentieth century.
Themes could include, but are not limited to:
Cross-cultural practices and patterns of dress and / or body adornment
Production and distribution of clothing (across cultures, entangled, comparative)
Gendered and ethnic shaping of dress and dress practice
Fashion politics of dress in globalizing contexts
Circulation and re-use of dress and dress idioms
Design in globalized contexts
Representations of clothing cultures
Appropriation / acculturation of designs, materials, motifs
Dress in colonial / post-colonial contexts
We especially welcome themed panels, maximum three speakers.
We welcome individual papers as well.
Submission Requirements:
For individual speakers: a 200-word proposal and a 1 page CV
For full panels: a 200-word panel rationale, plus 200 word proposals for each panel participant along with their individual 1 page CVs.
Send all submissions to: dgb.conference@ualberta.ca
Deadline for submissions: 1 October 2015.
Acceptances of papers to be announced: 1 December 2015.
Plenary Speakers:
Antonia Finnane, Professor, School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. Author of Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation. She will address fashion in Qing/Early Republican China
Karen Tranberg Hansen, Professor Emerita. Department of Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, Northwestern University. Author of Salaua: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia. She will address cultures of dress within Global Africa.
Dana Leibsohn, Priscilla Paine Van der Poel Professor of Art, Department of Art, Smith College. She will address colonial practice, cross-cultural influences in the dress of colonial Spanish America.
Principal Organizers:
Beverly Lemire, Professor & Henry Marshall Tory Chair, Department of History & Classics, University of Alberta
Giorgio Riello, Professor, Department of History and Director, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Warwick
International & Local Organizing Committee Members:
Anne Bissonnette, Associate Professor & Curator, Department of Human Ecology, University of Alberta
Lisa Claypool, Associate Professor, Department of Art & Design, University of Alberta
Lianne McTavish, Professor, Department of Art & Design, University of Alberta
Ann Salmonson, Masters Candidate, Department of Art & Design, University of Alberta
Ashley Sims, Doctoral Candidate, Department of History & Classics, University of Alberta
Meaghan Walker, Doctoral Candidate, Department of History & Classics, University of Alberta
Sophie White, Associate Professor, Department of American Studies, University of Notre Dame
