Rachel Silberstein

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.