Bryn Mawr Authors

A richly illustrated history of textiles in the Mughal Empire

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a vast array of textiles circulated throughout the Mughal Empire. Made from rare fibers and crafted using virtuosic techniques, these exquisite objects animated early modern experience, from the intimate, sensory pleasure of garments to the monumentality of imperial tents. The Art of Cloth in Mughal India tells the story of textiles crafted and collected across South Asia and beyond, illuminating how cloth participated in political negotiations, social conversations, and the shared seasonal rhythms of the year.

Drawing on small-scale paintings, popular poetry, chronicle histories, and royal inventory records, Sylvia Houghteling charts the travels of textiles from the Mughal imperial court to the kingdoms of Rajasthan, the Deccan sultanates, and the British Isles. She shows how the "art of cloth" encompassed both the making of textiles as well as their creative uses. Houghteling asks what cloth made its wearers feel, how it acted in space, and what images and memories it conjured in the mind. She reveals how woven objects began to evoke the natural environment, convey political and personal meaning, and span the distance between faraway people and places.

Beautifully illustrated, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India offers an incomparable account of the aesthetics and techniques of cloth and cloth making and the ways that textiles shaped the social, political, religious, and aesthetic life of early modern South Asia.

The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad is set mostly in the composite Donbas city of Z--an uncanny foretelling of what this letter has come to symbolize since February 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Several embedded narratives attributed to an alcoholic chemist-turned-massage therapist give insight into the funny, ironic, or tragic lives of people who remained in the occupied Donbas after Russia's initial aggression in 2014.

With elements of magical realism, Volodymyr Rafeyenko's novel combines a wicked sense of humor with political analysis, philosophy, poetry, and moral interrogation. Witty references to popular culture--Ukrainian and European--underline the international and transnational aspects of Ukrainian literature. The novel ends on the hopeful note that even death cannot have the final word: the resilient inhabitants of Z grow in power through reincarnation.

River Town Girl: A Memoir is about growing up in a small, working-class town on the Hudson River in the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s. One mile away across the river is New York City, but it might just as well be a thousand miles away. The town, Edgewater, has 4,000 people. Cut off by the river, which runs along it on the east, and the Palisades cliffs, which run along it on the west, it is rich in eccentric characters, and its life is shaped by the rhythms of the Hudson. The town is fertile ground for the delights and the powers of story telling. Today that version of the town is gone, buried under New Jersey's high-rise Gold Coast.

This story is about how a child of the 1950s becomes an adolescent of the 1960s and gradually but finally finds the strength to finish growing up. A bookish only child, the power of words to make sense of the world is life saving for her. In her books as a child and in her mother's stories and her father's journals, she comes to know a self both damaged and resilient. Later stories told in psychotherapy make sense of the overwhelming anxiety that threatens her.

The author treats memory as more episodic and fluctuating than traditional narratives do. Written in prose, poetry, lists, fragments, and dialogue and in both facts and imaginings, this patchwork creates a complex, coming-of-age story about a girl, a family, a town, a river, and a time now gone.