Dr Rachel Silberstein

Dr Rachel Silberstein is the co-convenor of the Arts of China module of SOAS-Alphawood Asian Art Programme.

She gained her DPhil in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford in 2015, with a dissertation on British and American museum collections of Qing dynasty women’s dress and embroidery. Her monograph, A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing (University of Washington Press, 2020) – a study of fashion and textile handicrafts in early modern China – won the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award 2021 and an honorable mention from the 2023 Bei Shan Tang Monograph Prize. She has taught courses in Chinese Art History and the History of Textiles and Dress at Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Washington. 

Her research has been supported by the Royal Ontario Museum’s Gervers Fellowship, Membership of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a British Academy Visiting Fellowship at the National Museums Scotland. She has also served as a consultant on Chinese dress and textile collections of museums including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and Brighton & Hove Museums.

“A Window into a Qing Embroidery Shop,” Hali, guest ed. Christine Ramphal (2025), Issue 224

“Fish Belly White and Capital Blue: naming and taming textile colours in 19th-century China”, China’s 1800s: Material and Visual Culture (2025, British Museum Research Publications Series)

“Fashion in Ming and Qing Dynasty China”, The Cambridge Global History of Fashion, eds. Beverly Lemire, Giorgio Riello and Chris Breward (2023)

“One Hundred Birds” Hanging Scroll, SmartHistory

A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing (2020, University of Washington Press)

“Other People’s Clothes: The Second-Hand Clothes Dealer and the Western Art Collector in Early Twentieth-Century China”, West 68th (Fall-Winter 2019), 26.2, pp.164-187

www.rachelsilbersteindphil.com