Talks

Narratives: Re-evaluating Bengal’s Textile History through Embroidery

Dr. Pika Ghosh teaches in the Art History Program at Villanova University (Pennsylvania, USA). Her research focus on the material culture of India and Bangladesh has ranged from early modern temple architecture and terra cotta sculpture to colonial-period repurposed textiles and embroidery, and painted paper handscrolls as a form of performance. Her first book, Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal (Indiana University Press, 2005), which addressed the role of a distinctive regional architectural form in framing devotional practice, received the inaugural Edward C. Dimock Prize in the Humanities from the American Institute of Indian Studies. Subsequently, Making Kantha, Making Home (University of Washington Press, 2020), listened for the voices of female needleworkers at the intersections of domestic networks, memories, perceptions, sensorial resonance and emotional experience. This project builds on her work for the 2009-10 Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition and catalog, Kantha, recipient of the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship.   

Dr. Sarah Fee joined ROM in April, 2009. She is responsible for the Museum’s renowned collection of ca. 15,000 textiles and fashion that come from greater Asia and Africa, as well as eastern Europe. Thematic interests include woven and printed textiles, textile trades, cross-cultural appropriations of cloth and dress, ceremonial exchange, spinning and dye technologies, and the history of museum textile collecting. Her research has been supported by grants from the Smithsonian Institution, The Wenner Gren Foundation, The Pasold Fund, and the Social Science and Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Sarah’s recent exhibition projects include Cloth that Changed the World: India’s Painted and Printed Cottons, Born of the Indian Ocean: The Silks of Madagascar, and BIG. Before joining ROM, she guest-curated Gifts & Blessings, the Textile Arts of Madagascar (NMAfA, Smithsonian Institution) and co-founded the Tandroy Ethnographic Museum (Berenty, Madagascar). Dr. Fee is cross-appointed to the Art Department, University of Toronto. She is a Chercheuse Affiliée at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris), a Research Associate at the Indian Ocean World Centre (McGill University), a Senior Fellow of Massey College, and currently serves on the editorial board of the Textile Museum Journal.