Since Fall 2004 I have been an assistant professor at Indiana University in the department of Apparel Merchandising and Interior Design (AMID), which has been housed throughout its history in the College of Arts and Sciences.  Although I was initially hired to teach in the Apparel Merchandising area, I am now one of two tenure-stream faculty members in the department’s new Fashion Design program.  AMID began offering a Fashion Design Certificate in 2005 and in 2009 proposed an undergraduate major in Fashion Design.  This proposal was approved by the IU system and was forwarded to the Indiana Commission for Higher Education for consideration in 2010.   

My discipline is currently undergoing a transformation.  While my PhD from the University of Minnesota was in “Design, Housing, and Apparel,” the term I most closely identify with today is “dress studies,” an emerging, inter-disciplinary field built on the foundations of costume history and fashion design as well as anthropology, folklore, and art history.  My publications include a monograph on the politics of dress in Somali culture (under contract with Indiana University Press) as well as four peer-reviewed journal articles (plus another in review), five chapters in peer-reviewed edited volumes, and one 8,000-word encyclopedia entry on dress in Somalia drawn entirely from my original research.  As a qualitative researcher, my methods of study have included historiography, aesthetic evaluation, material culture analysis, ethnography (focusing on Somalis and other Muslims in North America), virtual ethnography, and textual analysis.  Due to the inter-disciplinary nature of my work I am affiliated at IU with the African Studies program, the Islamic Studies program, and the newly-created Middle Eastern Studies program.  I am also an adjunct assistant professor in Anthropology and have been invited to cross-list my classes with East Asian Studies and West European Studies. 

In addition to Introductory Textile Science (AMID-H203/F203*), one of AMID’s large lectures for freshman- and sophomore-level students, I also teach upper-division undergraduate electives, primarily Dress Studies: Cultural Analysis (AMID-H401/F301).  One value I bring to my teaching is a foundation of knowledge on non-Western cultures; with a background in studio art (fibers) I also bring a focus on textile design and the analysis of materials used to construct dress.  I have a typical teaching load—two classes per semester—but since 2004 I have taught more than 1,500 students (averaging 150 per semester) without any help from graduate assistants.  Still, I have consistently earned positive student evaluations with scores above the median for instructors throughout the university and humanities disciplines.  In my first three years at IU I chaired the thesis committees of four MS graduates in Apparel Merchandising; in 2010 I began serving on the dissertation committee of a PhD student in Anthropology.  AMID does not have a PhD program and has not admitted any new Masters students since I have been at IU.

Much of my service (published book reviews and encyclopedia entries) has helped to establish my reputation as a scholar, particularly in Dress Studies and African Studies.  Within IU I have also served on the faculty advisory board for the Office of Women’s Affairs, given numerous invited lectures, and served on several department committees including the AMID scholarship committee and curriculum committee in Fashion Design.  In order to bridge disciplines, I have pushed myself to engage thoughtfully with the literature and philosophical concerns of several different departments and programs. 

* In Fall 2009, AMID adopted a new course numbering system.  “F” stands for “Fashion Design.”

I study ordinary objects that are used in extraordinary circumstances, items of material culture surrounding the body that are used to reflect and shape transformations such as acculturation and religious conversion.  This requires some innovative research methods (since people and cultures undergoing rapid change tend not to keep vast collections of objects and records) plus keeping an open mind about the role of dress as a means of personal and cultural expression.  I am guided by the idea that

"Man is born naked, but dies and is buried with clothes on."[1]

As soon as we enter this world, our bodies and our minds begin to accumulate social meanings encoded through dress, an intensely personal and multi-sensory medium. Dress is something that we see as well as feel, hear, smell, and taste.  It refers not just to clothing, but to other body supplements and modifications such as jewelry, hairstyles, perfume, and tattoos.[2]  The social meanings enacted through dress can either be familiar and reassuring or cause tension for individuals who are caught between cultures with opposing values.  Since my research has focused on African (Somali) and Islamic dress I am acutely aware that dress can also be a highly-charged political symbol whether the wearer intends it to be or not.  In some cases we create a philosophy or identity and then choose a style of dress to symbolize it (a good example would be military uniforms), but more often people engage dress to help create something that only partially exists.  We “dress the part” and hope that our plans for the future become reality.  My research methods have included aesthetic evaluation (of construction, surface, color, etc…) as well as a careful analysis of social meaning through historiography, ethnography, virtual ethnography (ethnographic methods adjusted for online environments), and textual analysis. 

[1] Hilaire Hiler, Meyer Hiler, Helen Grant Cushing, and Adah V. Morris (1939), Bibliography of Costume: A Dictionary Catalog of About Eight Thousand Books and Periodicals, New York: H.W. Wilson, pp xi.

[2] Joanne B. Eicher (2000), “Dress,” in Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women’s Issues and Knowledge, editors Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender, Routledge: New York, pp 422-423.

Thank you for visiting my website!  Please click on the links to the left for more information about my academic background and publications.