Professors talk fiction and fashion at Brown

By Josh Holderbaum
Western Herald

Two professors want to look at authors in a different way – not by what they wrote, but by what they wore.

Daneen Wardrop, Ph.D., and Katherine Joslin, Ph.D., English professors at Western Michigan University, will give lectures under the title, “Reading Dress and Discourse” at 7 p.m. Thursday in room 3025 of Brown Hall.

The two will discuss poet Emily Dickinson and author Edith Wharton by looking at their fashion sense and their character’s fashion sense.

“One can ‘read’ a person’s clothing just as one can read a work of literature,” Wardrop said. “In the case of reading clothing, some of the things Katherine and I find have to do with details about the wearer: the historical era, the home region, age, social class, and more. If these elements of clothing concern an author or work of literature, then we can read both dress and discourse as the two fields interrelate.”

The talk will include a slideshow from clothing collections the professors visited, where they learned to “read” clothing, Joslin said.

The lecture stems from new books released by each professor: “Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion” by Joslin, and “Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing” by Wardrop, both published last year and the first in the “Reading Dress” series that Joslin and Wardrop will edit.
Both the talk and the books began with the professors talking about fashion.

“We thought at first that we were collaborating on a single book that would feature garments from Dickinson’s birth in 1830 to Wharton’s death in the 1930s, a century of enormous changes in dress for men and especially for women,” Joslin said. “As it turned out, we had material for two separate but overlapping books about changes in fashion as well as changes for people laboring in the garment industry over the nineteenth century.”

Wardrop hopes the talk shows students how to combine seemingly unrelated interests into something interesting.

“One thing I hope they might consider is that there exists a range of possibilities in interdisciplinary work,” Wardrop said. “Combining a traditional academic discipline like literary criticism with a less traditional one like fashion history can yield some surprising and gratifying results.”

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=14208

Posted by bbohlen on Jan 27 2010. Filed under Campus, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Bethany Bohlen
Bethany Bohlen is the Photo and Art Editor for the Western Herald, Western Michigan University's student newspaper, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has worked for the Western Herald photography department since 2009, and was promoted to an editorial position. She also worked for the Alpena Community College Crosscut from 2008-2009. http://www.westernherald.com