Dyeing the Springtime: The Art and Poetry of Fleeting Textile Colors in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia

This paper explores the metaphorical and material significance of short-lived fabric dyes in medieval and early modern South Asian art, literature, and religious practice. It explores dyers’ manuals, paintings, textiles, and mercantile and devotional poetry to demonstrate how the existence of ephemeral dyes opened up possibilities for mutability that cannot be found within more stable, mineral pigments, set down on paper in painting. While the relationship between the image and the word in South Asian art is most often mutually enhancing, the relationship between words and color, and particularly between poetry and dye color, operates on a much more slippery basis. In the visual and literary arts of South Asia, dye colors offered textile artists and poets alike a palette of vibrant hues and a way to capture shifts in emotions and modes of devotion that retained a sense of impermanence. More broadly, these fragile, fleeting dye materials reaffirm the importance of tracing the local and regional histories even of objects, like textiles, that circulated globally

The Emperor’s Humbler Clothes: Textures of Courtly Dress in Seventeenth-Century South Asia

This study reconstructs the humbler components of South Asian courtly ensembles worn by the greatest Mughal emperors, which included relatively inexpensive tie-­dyed cloths made in Rajasthan and finely spun cotton muslins from Bengal. Court biographies, popular lexicons, and the letters sent from the Mughal court to its Rajput allies reveal that the fabrics used for dress in early modern South Asia were valued for sensory qualities, such as softness, saturation of color, and coolness on the skin, that went beyond the cost of the materials or the sophistication of the technology used to produce them. This project transports the study of dress in early modern South Asia beyond its current focus on the material wealth of imperial costumes to recover the sensory experience of wearing airy cotton and velvety wool, as well as the sophisticated intellectual, poetic, and political messages that could be carried in the fabric of a courtly coat

The Emperor’s Humbler Clothes: Textures of Courtly Dress in Seventeenth-Century South Asia

This study reconstructs the humbler components of South Asian courtly ensembles worn by the greatest Mughal emperors, which included relatively inexpensive tie-­dyed cloths made in Rajasthan and finely spun cotton muslins from Bengal. Court biographies, popular lexicons, and the letters sent from the Mughal court to its Rajput allies reveal that the fabrics used for dress in early modern South Asia were valued for sensory qualities, such as softness, saturation of color, and coolness on the skin, that went beyond the cost of the materials or the sophistication of the technology used to produce them. This project transports the study of dress in early modern South Asia beyond its current focus on the material wealth of imperial costumes to recover the sensory experience of wearing airy cotton and velvety wool, as well as the sophisticated intellectual, poetic, and political messages that could be carried in the fabric of a courtly coat

Tools of the Master Dyer: Dye Materials in 17th and 18th Century South Asian Painted Cotton Textiles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This article reports on an analysis of the dyes used in painted cotton textiles from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The purpose of our study was to identify which red dyes were used to produce the textiles, and to determine whether dyers used cheaper substitutes for indigo as dyestuffs. Our findings preliminarily suggest that chay root (Oldenlandia umbellata L.) was not only a dye material used along the Coromandel Coast, but also traveled through overland trade networks for textile dyeing in central India. The results of this analysis contribute to understandings of regional specializations in dyestuffs. More broadly, this study may provide evidence for the mobility of dye materials and the agency that South Asian dyers had to choose their dye materials

Tools of the Master Dyer: Dye Materials in 17th and 18th Century South Asian Painted Cotton Textiles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This article reports on an analysis of the dyes used in painted cotton textiles from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The purpose of our study was to identify which red dyes were used to produce the textiles, and to determine whether dyers used cheaper substitutes for indigo as dyestuffs. Our findings preliminarily suggest that chay root (Oldenlandia umbellata L.) was not only a dye material used along the Coromandel Coast, but also traveled through overland trade networks for textile dyeing in central India. The results of this analysis contribute to understandings of regional specializations in dyestuffs. More broadly, this study may provide evidence for the mobility of dye materials and the agency that South Asian dyers had to choose their dye materials

The two-mode puzzle: Confronting self-interacting neutrinos with the full shape of the galaxy power spectrum

A cosmological scenario in which the onset of neutrino free-streaming in the early universe is delayed until close to the epoch of matter-radiation equality has been shown to provide a good fit to some cosmic microwave background (CMB) data, while being somewhat disfavored by Planck CMB polarization data. To clarify this situation, we investigate in this paper CMB-independent constraints on this scenario from the Full Shape of the galaxy power spectrum. Although this scenario predicts significant changes to the linear matter power spectrum, we find that it can provide a good fit to the the galaxy power spectrum data. Interestingly, we show that the data display a modest preference for a delayed onset of neutrino free-streaming over the standard model of cosmology, which is driven by the galaxy power spectrum data on mildly non-linear scales. This conclusion is supported by both profile likelihood and Bayesian exploration analyses, showing robustness of the results. Compared to the standard cosmological paradigm, this scenario predicts a significant suppression of structure on subgalactic scales. While our analysis relies on the simplest cosmological representation of neutrino self-interactions, we argue that this persistent - and somehow consistent - picture in which neutrino free-streaming is delayed motivates the exploration of particle models capable of reconciling all CMB, large-scale structure, and laboratory data.Comment: 14 pages + references, 9 figures, 2 table

Single-cell Analysis of the Neonatal Immune System Across the Gestational Age Continuum

Although most causes of death and morbidity in premature infants are related to immune maladaptation, the premature immune system remains poorly understood. We provide a comprehensive single-cell depiction of the neonatal immune system at birth across the spectrum of viable gestational age (GA), ranging from 25 weeks to term. A mass cytometry immunoassay interrogated all major immune cell subsets, including signaling activity and responsiveness to stimulation. An elastic net model described the relationship between GA and immunome (R=0.85, p=8.75e-14), and unsupervised clustering highlighted previously unrecognized GA-dependent immune dynamics, including decreasing basal MAP-kinase/NFkB signaling in antigen presenting cells; increasing responsiveness of cytotoxic lymphocytes to interferon-a; and decreasing frequency of regulatory and invariant T cells, including NKT cells and MAIT cells. Knowledge gained from the analysis of the neonatal immune landscape across GA provides a mechanistic framework to understand the unique susceptibility of preterm infants to both hyper-inflammatory diseases and infections

Pictures at an Exhibition

Sunday November 6, 2016 -- 2:00-3:30pm Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling Facilitated by Carolyn Peter, Director Laband Art Gallery Set in a Paris darkened by World War II, Sara Houghteling’s sweeping and sensuous debut novel tells the story of a son’s quest to recover his family’s lost masterpieces, looted by the Nazis during the occupation.Born to an art dealer and his pianist wife, Max Berenzon is forbidden from entering the family business for reasons he cannot understand. He reluctantly attends medical school, reserving his true passion for his father’s beautiful and brilliant gallery assistant, Rose Clément. When Paris falls to the Nazis, the Berenzons survive in hiding. They return in 1944 to find that their priceless collection has vanished: gone are the Matisses, the Picassos, and a singular Manet of mysterious importance. Madly driven to recover his father’s paintings, Max navigates a torn city of corrupt art dealers, black marketers, Résistants, and collaborators. His quest will reveal the tragic disappearance of his closest friend, the heroism of his lost love, and the truth behind a devastating family secret.Written with tense drama and a historian’s eye for detail, Houghteling’s novel draws on the real-life stories of France’s preeminent art-dealing familes and the forgotten biography of the only French woman to work as a double agent inside the Nazis’ looted art stronghold. Pictures at an Exhibition conjures the vanished collections, the lives of the artists and their dealers, the exquisite romance, and the shattering loss of a singular era. It is a work of astonishing ambition and beauty from an immensely gifted new novelist.https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/jewishbookgroup/1002/thumbnail.jp