While the sun is bright and Parsons quiets for the summer, ADHT’s faculty continue researching, publishing, writing, and creating.  Take a look below to read about our faculty members’ exciting pursuits these past few months.

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster, shot in LA for a collaborative project on fast-fashion with Christina Moon.

Margot Bouman

In addition to co-curating Masterpieces of Everyday New York: Objects as Story with Radhika Subramanian, earlier this summer, together with a small team of faculty from Parsons Margot Bouman traveled to Mumbai to consult with the Indian School of Design Innovation: Parsons Mumbai on their curriculum prior to the school’s imminent launch. This new school will introduce ADHT’s core curriculum–including its first-year courses Objects as History and Integrative Seminar 1 and 2–to new cultural and geographical contexts.  Professor Bouman is also writing an article that will be included in an edited volume of essays and art celebrating the distinguished cultural theorist Janet Wolff’s work. The University of Manchester Press has committed to this project. Amongst the academic contributors are Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey, Griselda Pollock, Howard Singerman, and Jackie Stacy. Finally, an article that Margot Bouman will be writing in August on Christian Marclay’s installation “The Clock” has been solicited by The Journal of Curatorial Studies.           

David Brody

David Brody has continued work on his forthcoming book, Do Not Disturb: Design, Hotels, and Labor, which is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press.  You can read more about the book and hear him speak about it here.

Francesca Granata

Francesca Granata continued working on her first monograph, Fashion Unbound: Carnival, Performance and the Grotesque Body, and she completed an article for the edited volume Thinking through Fashion  (Palgrave McMillan, I.B. Tauris) on the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin’s relevance to fashion studies.  In addition, she started research on a new project bringing together visual culture, fashion, and medical history on “Fashion, Health and Aids” from the 1980s to the mid-1990s.

Freyja Hartzell

Freyja Hartzell has continued work on her book about the German designer Richard Riemerschmid (1868-1957).  She has also been finalizing an article on the relationship between Riemerschmid’s modern design and German art of the Late Medieval and Renaissance periods, which will appear in Interiors journal in 2014.  In the coming months, Freyja Hartzell plans to investigate the significance of “wood” as material and metaphor in German culture.                                                  

Christina Moon

Christina Moon spent this summer conducting field research on the fast-fashion industry in Los Angeles, interviewing vendors, designers, workers, and families of the immigrant communities working in the industry.  This project is in collaboration with the photographer Lauren Lancaster, and tells the story of fast-fashion through immigration, work, family and everyday lives while exploring the interplay between image and text. Christina also contributed to Masterpieces of Everyday New York: Objects as Story, and her writing contribution was included in an article publication in Papermag.

Professor Moon finished up a book chapter titled “Colors, Patterns, Fabric and Trim: fast-fashion families in downtown L.A.” for a book project titled Speculation co-edited by Carin Kuoni (Vera List Center) and Vyjayanthi Rao (Anthropology New School). She contributed an interview for the journal, The Margins, with Herb Tam of the Museum of the Chinese of the Americas (MOCA) and Mary Ping, New York based fashion designer, about their show Front Row: Chinese American Designers (April 26, 2013 to September 29, 2013) for which she also wrote an introductory essay for its exhibition catalog.  She has recently become a contributing writer for the journal Open City,where she will regularly write on topics of fashion, New York, and immigrant communities.

Professor Moon also developed a new class syllabus for a course titled Ephemera which she will teach this fall and continues to work on her dissertation/book manuscript.  She had the pleasure of devoting much of her time this summer on reading and writing, and being with her lovely friends and family.