May 13, 2022

Colloquium Topic: The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World

Textiles are one of humanity's oldest and most influential technologies--the words textile and technology both come from the Indo-European root meaning "to weave"--but nowadays most people take them for granted. Drawing on her widely praised book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, author Virginia Postrel will take us on a tour of some of the innovations--in fiber, spinning, weaving, and dyeing--that gave us today’s textile abundance and the ways textiles shaped science, technology, economics, and civilization as we know it. In addition, she will share some of the textiles and other artifacts she collected during her research.

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Colloquium Speaker: Virginia Postrel

Virginia Postrel is a Los Angeles-based author, columnist, and researcher whose latest book is The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. Her previous books include The Power of Glamour, The Substance of Style, and The Future and Its Enemies. Her research for The Fabric of Civilization was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. She is a graduate of Princeton University.