Diversity in Fashion Speaker Series

The Department of Textiles, Merchandising, and Interiors Diversity in Fashion Speaker Series kicks off on Friday, March 25, 2022. Please see below for speaker names, topics, and dates. Location: 410 Dawson Hall. Time: 4:10 PM

March 25 - Jonathan Michael Square: “Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom”

Square is the Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Fashion Institute of Technology, and most recently Harvard University. He has a Ph.D. from New York University, a M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. from Cornell University. As a proponent in the power of social media as a platform for radical pedagogy, he founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom, which explores the intersection of fashion and slavery. While serving as a fellow in the Costume Institute, Square will work on a book manuscript on the same topic, tentatively titled Negro Cloth: How Slavery Birthed the Global Fashion Industry.

April 4 - Angela Nurse: “Race and Gender in Daily Dress”

Nurse (she/her) received her doctorate degree from Michigan State University in sociology in 2015. Currently, she is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of San Diego. Her scholarship and pedagogy explore the entanglement of social forces, such as ideologies and institutions, and individual behavior and preferences. She is particularly interested in how racialized and gendered corporal ideologies are managed, implicated, and created through individual daily dress practice. Angela has given formal research presentations for the American Sociological Association and the Pacific Sociology Association but also loves talking anything fashion and style. Currently she is working on a book project tentatively titled, “Race and Daily Dress” with University of Georgia press that explores these themes among women in college. Angela also serves as a board member for Dress and Body Society, and is a member of Costume society of America, and the American Sociology Association. 

April 18 - Heather Akou: “Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion”

Akou is an associate professor in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University, specializing in histories of fashion, dress, and the body.  Her work on Islamic fashion has been published in Dress, Fashion Theory, HAWWA, and Contemporary Islam.  This lecture is drawn from a forthcoming chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Islamic Ritual and Practice.  Dr. Akou’s other research interests include African fashion, politics and lawmaking about dress, museum collections, secret society regalia and working-class histories of dress in the United States.

April 29 - Lauren Downing Peters: “In Search of the Forgotten Woman: Plus-Size Fashion, Fat Bodies and Archival Silences”

Peters is assistant professor of Fashion Studies and Director of the Fashion Study Collection at Columbia College Chicago. Her research focuses on the history of plus-size fashion, the lived experience of fat sartorial embodiment and transformed and inclusive fashion pedagogies. Her work has been published in the peer-reviewed journals Fashion Theory, Design Issues, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, International Journal of Fashion Studies and the Journal of Curatorial Studies, among others. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, Fashion Before Plus-Size: Bodies, Beauty and the Birth of an Industry (Bloomsbury, In Contract).

Series partially supported by the New Approaches Diversity in Fashion Grant awarded to Dr. Katalin Medvedev, Dr. Jaleesa Reed, and Sha'Mira Covington.