Reflections on the Symposium
Last November, I had the pleasure of presenting at and attending the Textile Society of America’s 2024 Symposium, Shifts and Strands: Rethinking the Possibilities and Potentials of Textiles. I was able to attend the online symposium because of a Student/New Professional Award. I learned a lot from this symposium, not only from the presentations but also through preparations for presenting my own paper. It was not my first time presenting at a conference, although this was certainly the largest audience I had presented for. More significantly, the symposium’s online format was new for me, and when preparing for my presentation I had to keep in mind that presenting online would be different than speaking in person.
Ultimately presenting at the symposium was a really good experience and made me a more comfortable and confident speaker. I am excited for future opportunities to present my research. I’m glad that this award gave me the opportunity to speak in such a welcoming environment filled with engaging speakers who presented on a wide variety of topics. While the symposium’s online format made me slightly apprehensive at first, it also offered some very clear benefits. Because of the online format I did not have to travel. I also had the chance to listen and engage with speakers from across the world, and presenters associated with varied universities and institutions, which certainly would not have been possible had this been an in-person symposium.
One symposium session that really stuck with me during and after the symposium was an organized session entitled “Textiles in Ethiopian Manuscripts: Eastern Africa’s Engagement with Early Modern ‘Textile Roads’”. This session underscored for me how the symposium’s online format enabled presentations that brought together scholars from all over the world. The Textiles in Ethiopian Manuscripts project is a research group centered at the University of Toronto that consists of a multidisciplinary team from all over the world.
The project featured in this session studies textiles found in Ethiopian manuscripts, particularly the fabric swatches or ‘pastedowns’ found in the inside covers of manuscript bindings. These fabric swatches were produced across Asia and Europe and their existence attests to the interconnectedness of global trade. Significantly, because of the relative absence of surviving pre-modern textiles from Sub-Saharan Africa, these textiles are some of the only remaining indicators of Ethiopia’s wide-reaching trade connections.
The organized session featured four presenters affiliated with the project: Dr. Hagos Abay, Dr. Sarah Fee, Rosemary Crill, and Dr. Philip Sykas. The speakers, with the assistance of the session chair, Michael Gervers, explained the origins of the project and their findings so far. Dr. Abay discussed the practice of textile pastedowns in manuscripts. Dr. Fee explained how the manuscripts’ textile pastedowns demonstrated the extensive global connections of Ethiopian trade. Rosemary Crill focused specifically on the Asian and particularly Indian textiles found in the manuscript bindings. Finally, Dr. Philip Sykas spoke about the use of European printed cottons, often British in origin, that were used in the pastedowns.
I found all of these papers fascinating. Through studying fabric swatches preserved within manuscripts, these researchers discovered an avenue through which a previously understudied and neglected topic- the distribution of global textiles in Ethiopia- could be highlighted.
Isabel Monseau graduated from Smith College with a BA degree in Art History and from the University of Glasgow with an MLitt in Dress and Textile History. She is interested in studying cotton printed textiles from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on investigating foreign influences on British-made textiles, as well as the impact of industrialization on British textile design.
