In-Between Textiles, 1400-1800: Weaving Subjectivities and Encounters, shortlisted for the 2024 Book of the Year Award of the Association of Dress Historians, has been unveiled to be also one of three finalists for the highly prestigious R.L. Shep Memorial Book Award of the Textile Society of America.

Given annually to a publication judged to be the best book in the field of global cultural heritage textile studies, the R.L. Shep Memorial Book Award rewards exceptional scholarship that focuses on textiles through a lens of cultural practices and ancestral heritage. This year, the Textile Society of America had an unusually large field of nominations of very high calibre.

The shortlisted volume has been co-created by Dr Beatriz Marín-Aguilera, Derby Fellow in Historical Legacies of Empire from the University of Liverpool’s archaeology and history departments, and Professor Stefan Hanß, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester’s history department and Deputy Director and Scientific Lead of the John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester.

In this volume, Marín-Aguilera and Hanß brought together world-leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, conservators, curators, historians, scientists, and weavers to present a decentred study of how textiles shaped, disrupted, and transformed identities in the age of the first globalisation.

“This nomination is such a privilege,” Hanß says, “we are delighted over such humbling news. What makes this volume so unique is its global and cross-disciplinary coverage and its methodological innovation potential.”

“The volume weaves together ideas and materials of globally leading textile researchers from a number of disciplines from across the world,” Marín-Aguilera explains. “In-Between Textiles opens new conversations across disciplines that position historical textiles at the forefront of novel methodological debates that span material culture studies, critical cultural theory, and postcolonial theory. We want to know more, and more complex stories, about what material culture reveals about subjectivity at times of globalisation and colonisation.”

The volume has been praised as a “remarkable collection” (Giorgio Riello, Florence) and a “pioneering,” “excellent read.” “Beautifully illustrated, incisive, and original,” Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge) writes, “this book presents cutting-edge scholarship.” Indian literary critic Homi K. Bhabha (Harvard University) calls this an “outstanding volume” with “enthralling volumes”: “At a time when the fabric of democracy is rent by xenophobic zealotry, this outstanding volume provides us with the warp and woof of historical exchange and cultural co-existence.”

The shortlist has been announced here

https://textilesocietyofamerica.org/13707/judges-shortlist-three-books-for-the-r-l-shep-memorial-book-award-2

Image right: (c) Textile Society of America, https://textilesocietyofamerica.org/13707/judges-shortlist-three-books-for-the-r-l-shep-memorial-book-award-2.

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