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Faculty experts at the George Washington University are available to offer insight, analysis and commentary on the significance and historical relevance of spotlighting Black fashion. To schedule an interview with an expert, please contact GW Media Relations Specialist Tayah Frye at [email protected].
Tanya Wetenhall is an assistant professor of design history for the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at the George Washington University. With a focus on object-based teaching and learning, her courses encompass fashion and costume history, fashion in art, world dress practices and the cultural histories of the theatre and ballet design. Her research explores the manifestation of national identity in design. Wetenhall has published and presented on Russian dress and textiles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, costume design of interwar and wartime Britain, and fashionable dress depicted in European, Asian, and American art. She has worked at MoMu—Fashion Museum Antwerp; The Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami Beach; and taught in the graduate costume, fashion and textile studies programs at New York University and the Fashion Institute of Technology.
“The theme of the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition The Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, inspired by curator Monica Miller’s book on Black Dandyism, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (2009) underlines how the study of fashion, not only its history, but as material culture, opens diverse pathways of enquiry that in turn suggest new themes for research and provides fresh perspectives, in this case on the Black American experience,” says Wetenhall.
Loren Kajikawa is chair of the music program at The George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. His main area of research and teaching is American music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with special attention to the dynamics of race and politics. Kajikawa’s writings have appeared in American Music, Black Music Research Journal, ECHO: a music-centered journal, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Popular Music and Society, among others. Kajikawa can discuss the intersections of hip-hop, fashion and Black history.
Gayle Wald is a professor of English at the George Washington University. Wald is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American literature and popular music, a cultural historian as well as a cultural theorist. Wald has authored a variety of articles, essays, and journalistic pieces about literature, popular music (from boy bands to punk rock to Motown to gospel), and visual media. As a published author on Black women, music and fashion, Wald can discuss these intersections and how they translate to Black dandyism.
Imani Cheers, an associate professor of media and public affairs, is an award-winning digital storyteller, director, producer, and filmmaker. As a professor of practice, she uses a variety of mediums including video, photography, television, and film to document and discuss issues impacting and involving people of the African Diaspora. Her scholarly focus is on the intersection of women/girls, technology, health, conflict, agriculture, and the effects of climate change in sub-Saharan Africa. Cheers is also an expert on diversity in Hollywood, specifically the representation of Black women in television and film.
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