Enfilade

From the BGC press release (11 November 2022). . .

Bard Graduate Center (BGC) announces the appointment of Assistant Professor Dr. Mei Mei Rado, who will begin teaching at BGC on 1 January 2023. Drawing on her specialties in textiles, dress, and decorative arts in both China and France, Dr. Rado’s research and teaching at BGC will focus on the history of East Asian and European textiles and dress in broader transcultural contexts, featuring deep object-based knowledge and a global perspective. Dr. Rado’s expertise complements the interdisciplinary research of Bard Graduate Center’s faculty and will help expand BGC’s programs in textile and fashion history, Chinese art and material culture, and European decorative arts and design history.

“Dr. Rado brings extraordinary intellectual energy and seriousness to the study of dress, textiles, and fashion,” said Peter N. Miller, Dean of Bard Graduate Center. “She also firmly establishes East Asia as a center of curricular and research strength. But her interest in cross-cultural communication adds still further depth to something BGC does very well.”

Mei Mei Rado stated, “One of my goals is to champion BGC’s diverse, interdisciplinary research and teaching. I look forward to collaborating with faculty in different fields and approaching textiles and dress from multiple academic angles and cultural perspectives. BGC’s unique exhibition program also enables me to continue and expand my curatorial practice. I am grateful to BGC Director and Founder Susan Weber and Dean Peter Miller for this opportunity, and I’m honored to continue the legacy of BGC Professor Emerita Michele Majer, who has trained generations of textile and fashion scholars, including myself.”

Dr. Rado has lectured and published on 1920s French textiles and fashion, chinoiserie and Japonisme fashion, twentieth-century Chinese textiles and fashion, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Qing court arts, and interior draperies in eighteenth-century France. Her forthcoming book The Empire’s New Cloth: Western Textiles at the Eighteenth-Century Qing Court investigates European silks and tapestries that entered the Chinese court and Qing imperial productions inspired by European models. It recounts a multipolar story from both cultural ends, showing how objects, styles, and images traveled in multiple directions replete with reinvented meanings.

Before joining BGC, Dr. Rado was the Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles at LACMA. She also held fellowship positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, and the Palace Museum, Beijing. Dr. Rado earned her B.A.at Nanjing University, her M.A.at the University of Chicago, and her Ph.D. from Bard Graduate Center.