HIAA Professor Holly Shaffer, an Officer at The American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA), helped create a virtual program taking place on February 27, hosted by Siddhartha V. Shah, Curator of South Asian Art and Director of Education and Civic Engagement at the Peabody Essex Museum.

Cloth, Comfort and Care: New Scholarship on South Asian Textiles will be a conversation with renowned art historians, Pika Ghosh (Visiting Associate Professor, Haverford College) author of the book Making Kantha, Making Home: Women at Work in Colonial Bengal, and Sylvia Houghteling (Assistant Professor, Bryn Mawr College), author of the book-in-progress The Art of Cloth in Mughal India. In these talks, the authors will discuss how objects ranging from Mughal imperial robes of honor to embroideries created on repurposed cloth for household use held the intimacy of touch and conveyed gestures of affection.