Cecilia Gunzburger

Biography

Cecilia Gunzburger is a textile historian with expertise in European, American, and global textiles and historic textile technologies. Her research interests focus on the circulation and exchange of textiles and textile technologies in the early modern period, and the social construction of identity through furnishing and dress. 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 comment on transcultural identity. Cecilia lectures and leads study tours on topics ranging from Kashmir shawls to contemporary New York fashion. She previously worked as a curator at The Textile Museum in Washington, DC and the Museum at FIT in New York.

Professor Gunzburger teaches courses on textile history and museum practice: Textiles in European History, Textiles in Global Trade, Textiles in the Historic Interior, and Historic Textile Analysis, as well as Museum Curatorship, Theory and Methodology of Decorative Arts History, and other decorative arts history courses.

Current Research

Professor Gunzburger is currently working on a book on lace in women’s domestic spaces in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries within the performance of civility and construction of elite European identity in the age of global colonialism.

Distinctions/Publications

“Drawnwork and Cutwork.” Encyclopedia of World Textiles, forthcoming in 2027.

“Batik to Abstraction in the Art of Emily Kame Kngwarreye.” In Beyond Dreamings: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States, Henry F. Skerritt, ed. Charlottesville, Virginia: Kluge-Rhue Aborigial Art Collection of the University of Virginia, 2018.

“Weaving” and “Loom.” World Book Encyclopedia Online. August 2017.

“We Are What We Wear: Cross-cultural Uses of Textiles.” In Pattern ID, Ellen Rudolph, ed. Akron, Ohio: Akron Art Museum, 2010.

Editor, The Textile Museum Thesaurus. Washington, DC: The Textile Museum, 2005.

“Tradition and Transformation in Chicahuaxtla Trique Textiles.” Textile Society of America 9th Biennial Symposium Proceedings, 2005

Education

BA, Anthropology, University of Tennessee
MA, Fashion and Textile Studies, SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology
PhD in progress, Art and Architectural History, University of Virginia

Professional Organizations

International Centre for the Study of Historic Textiles/Centre International de Etudes des Textiles Anciens
Textile Society of America
Decorative Arts Trust
International Committee on Museums, Costume and Historic House Committees