Advisory Board

SENIOR TUTOR AND HISTORIAN (UK)

Sarah is Senior Tutor on the History of Design programme at the Royal College of Art (UK), Modern and Contemporary specialism. Her research interests centre on transnational fashion, material culture and the body. Sarah joined the RCA in September 2011. From 2005 to 2011, she was Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion, where she established courses on fashion, race and the body. She has a special interest in the role of Chinese material culture within histories of Western fashionable dress and domestic interiors, a subject on which she has published widely and lectures frequently. Her co-edited collection, Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion (2008), and continued research and publishing on hair, fashion and identity have also led to contributions to magazines, exhibition catalogues, festivals, radio and television. Learn more at www.rca.ac.uk.

ASSISTANT CURATOR OF COSTUME AT THE MUSEUM AT FIT

Elizabeth Way is Assistant Curator of Costume at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her exhibitions include Global Fashion Capitals (2015), Black Fashion Designers (2016), and curated Fabric In Fashion (2018). Publications include “Dressing to Pass During the Harlem Renaissance: Fashion in the Novels of Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen,” Fashion Theory (2020); “Strands of the Diaspora: Black Hair in the Americas 1800-1920,” in A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Empire (2018); and “Elizabeth Keckly and Ann Lowe: Recovering an African American Fashion Legacy That Clothed the American Elite” in Fashion Theory (2015).

LECTURER, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Jonathan Michael Square specializes in Afro-Diasporic fashion and art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His current book project, Negro Cloth: How Slavery Built the Global Fashion Industry, explores self-fashioning among enslaved peoples as a profoundly political act and one of the most radical forms of self-affirmation in a slave society. He has taught at New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Parsons School of Design, and currently teaches at Harvard University. Square has also published in a number of academic journals, including Radical History Review, British Art Studies, Fashion Studies Journal, Vestoj, as well as in the popular press for Refinery29, Fashionista, Hyperallergic, and in exhibition catalogs, including Willi Smith: Street Couture, Garmenting. He was also the curator of the exhibitions Slavery in the Hands of Harvard and Freedom from Truth: Self-Portraits of Nell Painter at Harvard University. Square founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom. Learn more at harvard.edu/jonathansquare/bio.