Eryn Talevich

Eryn Talevich is pursuing a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology at California State University, Northridge, with a minor in Queer Studies. As an undergraduate, her ethnographic work focused on Beatrice Wood’s style, and informed her passion for dress studies. Her research engages the anthropology of dress and textiles, specifically the intersection of clothing and power. Her interest in contemporary festival dress and drag focuses on materiality and performance, and seeks to explore the ways that clothing contains (through artisanship, sympathetic and contagious magic, folk religion, and inheritance), and conveys agency (assemblage, embodiment, and ritual) in identity making. Her aim is to celebrate strategies of empowerment, with attention to how “tradition” functions as a sophisticated approach to challenge and transform politics of exchange, spirituality, and gender in transnational contexts.