Editorial Board
Editors' Biographies
Djurdja Bartlett is a Research Fellow at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. Her main research interests are in the theory of fashion, history of fashion, and comparative fashion studies, with an emphasis on socialist and post-socialist fashion. She has published articles and book chapters, and her book Fashion: the Spectre that Haunted Socialism will be published by MIT Press. She has also organised a series of international conferences on Disciplines of Fashion and has a PhD from the London College of Fashion.
Valerie Cumming is Chairman, The Costume Society, and formerly Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Museum of London. She is a dress and social historian whose career has included working with museum collections of fashionable, royal and theatre dress at The Museum of London and Kensington Palace and lecturing at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has published extensively in catalogues, journals and as a lone and joint author of seven books, the most recent is Understanding Fashion History, 2004. She chairs the Olive Matthews Collection Trust whose nationally significant collection of costume and textiles is held by Chertsey Museum, UK.
Jasleen Dhamija is known internationally for her expertise in the history of textiles and costumes, and has published extensively on the folk arts and crafts of both India and Iran. She has been a faculty member at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, New Delhi, where she taught the History of Indian Textiles and Costumes. She was a visiting member of the faculty of the National Institute of Design and Resident Scholar in Textiles at the University of Canberra. She has also been awarded the Hill Professorship by the University of Minnesota.
Joanne B. Eicher is a worldwide authority on the anthropology of dress. She is Editor for Berg’s Dress, Body, Culture series, and is the author, co-author or editor of a wide range of books including: The Visible Self; Mother, Sister, Bride: Rituals of Womanhood; Fashion Foundations; and Dress and Ethnicity. She has lectured and presented papers on five continents. Her research focuses on dress as non-verbal communication with research emphasis on Africa and the textile trade from India to Africa. She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Minnesota where she served as department head of Design, Housing, and Apparel, and Director of the Goldstein Museum of Design. She received her PhD from Michigan State University. Her honors include the Leadership Award from ACASA (Arts Council of African Studies Association) and Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Iowa State University.
Blenda Femenías is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at George Washington University. She has also taught anthropology, art and culture, gender, and Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Brown University, Tufts University, and the University of Pittsburgh. She has been Curator of the Helen Allen Textile Collection, University of Wisconsin-Madison and has also worked at The Textile Museum and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Gender and the Boundaries of Dress in Contemporary Peru, and has contributed articles to a wide range of books and journals. She has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Joseph D. Horse Capture is Associate Curator of the Department of African, Oceanic, and Native American Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He has organized several exhibitions including Beauty, Honor, and Tradition: The Legacy of Plains Indian Art in conjunction with The National Museum of the American Indian-Smithsonian Institution. He is on the Board of Directors for the Otsego Institute for Native American Art History, and has curated exhibitions at museums both nationally and internationally.
Margaret Maynard is an Honorary Research Consultant in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, and was the first to teach the academic study of dress history in Australia. She has published widely, and is considered a foremost expert on Australian fashion and dress. Her most recent book is Dress and Globalisation, and she is currently working on a cultural history of 20th-century Australian fashion photography, photographers and photographic models.
Lynn A. Meisch has spent much of the past 33 years conducting ethnographic fieldwork on the traditional textiles of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. Her research interests include dress and ethnicity, indigenous rights, gender and tourism, and globalization and ethnic art. She has published extensively on these topics, especially textiles, and collected for museums in the United States and Bolivia. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1997, and then joined the faculty at Saint Mary's College of California, Moraga, where she is Chair of the Anthropology Department.
Doran H. Ross is the Editor of African Arts and Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, and is a widely published author. He was Deputy Director and Curator of African collections at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History from 1981 to 1996, and Director of the Museum from 1996 until his retirement in 2001. He is a past president of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and has been project director and/or curator of over 30 African and African American exhibition and publication projects.
Margot Blum Schevill is a textile and folk art consultant, and author or co-author of a wide range of books including Maya Textiles of Guatemala and The Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes. She was a research associate at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley, and at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University. She has also curated exhibitions for these museums.
Lise Skov is Associate Professor of Creative Industries at Copenhagen Business School. She is the Editor of the Consumption in Asia (ConsumAsiaN) book series, and co-editor of Women, Media and Consumption in Japan. She has published an extensive range of articles analysing the interrelationship between fashion, luxury production and consumption globally, and is currently involved in an interdisciplinary comparative research programme on the socio-economic organization of creative industries. She has a PhD from Hong Kong University, and has held positions at Lund University and Copenhagen University.
Pamela Smith trained as an embroiderer and designer before gaining a Masters degree from the University of Brighton where her research concentrated on embroideries associated with the Russian Arts & Crafts movement. After 10 years at the National Trust (the UK’s heritage and conservation charity), Pamela now works as an independent writer, editor and speaker. She regularly contributes to magazines such as Embroidery and Selvedge and other publications, and gives lectures and practical workshops covering many aspects of Russian and Eastern European textile art. She is currently researching a book on Russian royal dress.
Phyllis Tortora is a widely published author of textbooks, encyclopedias and reference works, and a specialist on textiles and historic costume. Her books include Fairchild’s Dictionary of Textiles, the Dictionary of Fashion, and Fairchild’s Encyclopedia of Accessories. She is the co-author (with Keith Eubank) of Survey of Historic Costume: A History of Western Dress, and has contributed articles to Scribner’s Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion. She also served as consulting editor for Textiles, and was a faculty member of Queens College of the City University of New York, where she was Department Chair from 1973 to 1991. She has a PhD from New York University.
Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood is Director of the Textile Research Centre, Leiden, and is a textile archaeologist and dress historian, specialising in Southwest Asia. Gillian has published books and articles on a wide range of themes, including ancient Egyptian dress, medieval Egyptian clothing, and more recently on modern Iranian, Saudi Arabian and Omani dress. Gillian has also produced a number of international exhibitions on the theme of Southwest Asian dress. She has a PhD from the University of Manchester.
John E. Vollmer is an internationally renowned curator and scholar in the fields of Asian art, textiles and costumes, decorative arts and design. Prior to becoming a Consultant in 1991, John held a wide range of academic positions at universities in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia. He also has extensive international curatorial experience, and was Director of the Kent State University Museum, Ohio and the founding Executive Director of the Design Exchange, Toronto. He is the author of 30 museum exhibition catalogues, and his articles have been published in many international journals and publications.
