Biography
Rachel Silberstein is currently completing a DPhil on Nineteenth-Century Chinese Women’s Dress at the University of Oxford in the Department of Oriental Studies. Her research examines issues of fashion, identity, and consumption in Qing dynasty dress history. Her doctoral thesis centres upon a group of women’s jackets, characterized by the use of decorative roundels to frame embroidered narrative scenes. By using these jackets to explore the relationship between the Chinese fashion system and contemporary print and performance culture, she demonstrates the influence of popular culture upon Qing women’s dress. She was recently awarded the “2012 Veronika Gervers Research Fellowship in Textiles and Costume History” to research the Chinese dress collection of the Royal Ontario Museum.
Academic Research/Areas of Interest
- Chinese Material Culture
- Chinese Fashion and the Development of the Fashion System in Early Modern China
- The History of Chinese Dress
- Commercial and Artistic Genres of Chinese Embroidery