Cecilia Gunzburger
PhD Candidate
EmailBA, Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1996
MA, Fashion and Textile Studies, SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology, 2002
PhD, Art and Architectural History, University of Virginia, expected 2022
Cecilia is a textile historian interested in early modern decorative arts, dress, and interiors. Her research centers on transcultural negotiation of globalism in the early modern period, materiality and the role of objects in visual culture, and textile technologies. Her dissertation will examine early Italian needle lace as a primary means of the performance of emerging concepts of civility and European identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Cecilia teaches textile history and museum studies in the Smithsonian Institution and George Washington University’s Decorative Arts and Design History MA program. She founded a textile concentration covering European and global textile history and historic textile analysis to prepare emerging scholars for museum careers. Previously, she worked as a curator at The Textile Museum in Washington, DC, where she organized or contributed to exhibitions on a wide range of topics, including Navajo weaving, Huari textiles of the pre-Hispanic Andes, Wiener Werkstätte textiles, and Persian carpets. She has published on indigenous Trique weavers’ negotiation of cultural identity through textiles in Oaxaca, Mexico, and on contemporary artists’ use of global textiles to explore transcultural identity. Cecilia lectures and leads study tours on topics ranging from Kashmir shawls to contemporary New York fashion.