Project Team

Dr Meha Priyadarshini is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Edinburgh. Her research lies at the intersection of global history and material culture studies; in particular she is interested in using the two methodologies to explore lesser-known global connections. Her first book Chinese Porcelain in Colonial Mexico: The Material Worlds of an Early Modern Trade (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) focused on connections between Asia and colonial Latin America. It is a study of the transpacific trade connection through the production, trade, and consumption of porcelain. Her latest book-length publication is the edited volume Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Translation and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires (Getty Research Institute, 2022), which explores the cultural and artistic exchanges across the Pacific over a period of more than 300 years with an emphasis on the Spanish and American enterprises. Meha completed a PhD at Columbia University and has held numerous fellowships, including one at the Getty Research Institute, as well as at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut.

Dr Victoria de Lorenzo is a Lecturer at the London College of Fashion (UAL). As a textile historian, she is interested in the materiality of textiles as agents of economic and cultural change in processes of circulation from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Her holistic approach to textile history is grounded in a BA (Hons) in Textile Design (ESDI, Universitat Ramón Llull, Barcelona, with an Erasmus exchange at ÉnsAD, Paris), a BA (Hons) in the History of Art (Universitat de Barcelona, with exchanges at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the University of Pennsylvania), a two-year MA in the History of Design (Victoria and Albert Museum/ Royal College of Art), and an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Glasgow, funded by a Lord Kelvin-Adam Smith PhD scholarship. Her thesis, titled ‘Connecting Threads: The Transnational Textile Trade between Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Spanish-Speaking World’, employed a transnational approach to explore the reciprocal impact of textile traders, recipient societies, and intermediaries in the Anglo-Hispanic textile trade between the 1830s and 1914. In her research, she combines business records with other archival and material sources. She has published articles in Fashion Theory, Enterprise & Society (forthcoming), and, with the rest of the Connecting Threads team, in The Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. Most recently, she received a research grant from the Karun Thakar Fund for a forthcoming article.

Dr Deepthi Murali is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History and Art History and affiliate faculty at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University. She is an art historian of South Asia specialising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century courtly and decorative arts of South India. Her research examines transcultural processes of production of wood and ivory objects from southwestern India and cotton textiles from southeastern India, and the use of these objects across the Indian Ocean World. Her other project explores new media and use of Digital Humanities (DH) methodologies in the discipline of art history through a digital art history project called Digital Chintz, that studies the history of eighteenth-century chintz textiles in North American museum collections. She is also the co-Principal Investigator for the HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium, a digital public history project led by The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. For more on her past research and work on wood and ivory objects, please see her website. As a postdoctoral research fellow at RRCHNM from 2020–2022, Deepthi also worked on the public history podcast Consolation Prize, and digital public history projects such as Collecting These Times, and World History Commons. Deepthi has a BArch in Architecture from Bangalore University, India, an MS in History Preservation from The University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Dr Jason Heppler is the Senior Developer at RRCHNM and has developed and led numerous digital history projects over his career. A historian of the modern United States, he studies the environmental, urban, and political history of North America. His second book, Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism, will be published in spring 2024 with the University of Oklahoma Press. He also served as the co-editor of Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy (University of Cincinnati Press, 2020). He holds a BA in History and Economics from South Dakota State University, and an MA and PhD in History from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Avalon Fotheringham is the Curator for the South Asian textiles and dress collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Trained as a textile artist, she studied the History of Design at the Royal College of Art before joining the V&A. Her research focuses on South Asian textile and dress production and circulation, especially the influence of India on global histories of textiles and dress. She is the author of The Indian Textile Sourcebook: Patterns and Techniques (Thames & Hudson, 2019), as well as essays and articles on evolutions in Indian textile patterning, the impacts of colonialism on Indian dress, histories of Indian embroidery, the Indian transition to synthetic dyes, and more. In 2021 she helped establish the V&A’s Karun Thakar Fund, which supports studies of Asian and African textiles and dress all over the world.

Dr Mills Kelly is a Professor of History and the former Executive Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University. His new media interests centre on public history and the influence of digital media on student learning in history. He co-directed two NEH-funded education projects, World History Sources and Women in World History, which won the American Historical Association’s James Harvey Robinson Prize for Teaching Aids in 2006 for the best teaching resource of the previous two years. He was the principal investigator on another NEH-funded education project: Making the History of 1989: The Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. In recognition of his work on teaching with technology, Mills received the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award and George Mason University’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2005. In 2020, Mills received the Gutenberg Teaching Award from the University of Mainz. In 1999, he was a Pew National Fellow with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and from 2001–2003 was a fellow with the Visible Knowledge Project based at Georgetown University. He is currently working on a digital history of the Appalachian Trail, America’s oldest and most famous long-distance hiking trail. From 2018–2020, Mills was part of the presidential team of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), and served as the organisation’s president in 2018–2019. Mills is the author of Teaching History in the Digital Age (University of Michigan Press, 2013) and Without Remorse: Czech National Socialism in Late-Habsburg Austria (East European Monographs, 2007).