Department of English

• Monday, November 24, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We are thrilled to welcome Sylvia Houghteling (Bryn Mawr College) for a talk titled "To Dye a Page, to Weave a Book: Cloth Materials and Texts in South Asia."

Professor Houghteling writes:

“Spanning early modern to contemporary works from South Asia, this project reconsiders the role of textiles in books. While a text, which is readily preserved on parchment or paper, may also be copied, circulated, or even dematerialized through memory, a textile is typically in existence merely as long as its threads persist. This talk explores books that describe the making textiles, books that incorporate fabric samples, and books constructed entirely from textiles. It begins with books of dye recipes, inventories, and poetry that served as a means of memorializing the colors and textures of lost textiles. The absence of physical textiles in these earlier books is balanced out by the textual preservation of the evocative names for early modern cloths. Moving into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European merchant sample books came to preserve actual South Asian textiles in the form of swatches, and British colonial officials pasted squares of delicate cloths to bring home for manufacturers to copy. In the twentieth century, the form of the book with actual cloth samples from South Asia continued, raising questions about the value and meaning of the textiles included in their pages. A contemporary artist’s book in the Kislak collections, constructed of hand-spun and hand-woven khadi cloth, provides a counterpoint to these mercantile and colonial legacies by situating cloth not as a fragment of commodity but as a dense accretion of individual labor, environment, knowledge, and artistic skill.”

Sylvia Houghteling is an Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and the program in Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies at Bryn Mawr College where she teaches courses on early modern art, South Asian art and architecture, and textile history. Houghteling’s current research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Yale University Art Gallery. She is the author of The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022), which received the College Art Association’s 2023 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, the Textile Society of America’s 2022 R.L. Shep Book Award, and the 2024 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Her ongoing work focuses on natural dyes and the material histories of the eastern Indian Ocean trade.