Lisa Onaga | Re-Visioning Silk with MPIWG’s Proteins & Fibers Working Group

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Please join Fiber Optics, a new Stanford Humanities Center research workshop in honor of John Bender dedicated to building the field of critical fiber studies, for its first event of the winter quarter: a workshop with Lisa Onaga, Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), where she leads the Proteins and Fibers working group. 

Dr. Onaga will provide an overview of the working group’s recent activities and discuss how its collaborative methods of bringing historians, artists, and scientists together have been generative for her ongoing research about the silk textile culture of Amami Ōshima, the largest of the Amami islands, located south of Kyushu, Japan. 

Issues pertaining to labor, design, and ideas of ownership and heritage since the late-twentieth century are visibilized through Dr. Onaga’s critical analysis of tsumugi-making on Amami Ōshima. We are excited to engage with her work and, through it, consider themes such as:

  • Protein and cellulosic fibers in comparative perspective
  • Aesthetics of the natural/synthetic, tradition/innovation
  • STS, history of science & technology as methods and approaches

Silk fiber artist and PhD student in Modern Thought and Literature Kelsey Chen will provide comments and moderate discussion. 

 

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Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from an anonymous donor honoring the Directorship of former SHC Director John Bender, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities