Ilya Parkins

Assistant Professor, Gender and Women's Studies

Degrees 

  • MA, Women’s Studies, York
  • PhD, Social and Political Thought, York

Current Projects 

Modern Spectacles of Feminine Opacity, 1910-39

A transnational analysis of images of women as spectacularly unknowable in feminized mass cultural domains in the early twentieth century, including the beauty and fashion press, beauty manuals, window display, and film celebrity. The project traces the epistemological implications of such figurations and their relevance to modernity and modernist studies, and contributes to recent feminist interrogations of concepts of visibility, voice, and presence.

Research Interests

  • Feminist social and cultural theory       
  • Fashion and dress        
  • Theories of modernity 
  • Early twentieth-century cultural formations
  • Femininities

Selected Publications   

  • Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity. London: Berg, 2012

  • Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion. Ed. Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth M. Sheehan. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011.

  • " Elsa Schiaparelli and the Epistemology of Glamorous Silence." Topia 25 (2011): 20-25.

  • " Early Twentieth-Century Fashion Designer Life Writing." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13, no.1 (2011).
  • “Fashion as Methodology: Rewriting the Time of Women’s Modernity.” Time and Society 19, no. 1 (2010): 98-119.         
  • “Building a Feminist Theory of Fashion. Karen Barad’s Agential Realism.” Australian Feminist Studies 23, no. 58 (2008): 501-15.        
  • “Teaching Fashion and Feminist Theory: The Pedagogical Project of Ambivalence.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 12, no. 2 (2007-08): 67-82.        
  • “Feminist Witnessing and Social Difference: The Trauma of Heterosexual Otherness in Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth.” Women’s Studies 26, no. 2 (2007): 95-116.       
  • “Fashion, Femininity, and the Ambiguities of the Modern: A Feminist Theoretical Approach to Simmel.” Georg Simmel in Translation: Interdisciplinary Border Crossings in Culture and Modernity, ed. David D. Kim. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006.

Professional Service

  • Member-at-large, Executive Board, Women’s and Gender Studies et Recherches Féministes
  • Editorial Board member, Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice (formerly Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal)

 Professional Associations

  • Modernist Studies Association
  • Women's and Gender Studies et Recherches Féministes
  • Association for Cultural Studies
  • Costume Society of America

Teaching

  • GWST 100, Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies I
  • GWST 110, Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies II
  • GWST 216, Race, Class, and Sexuality in Feminism
  • GWST 333, Perspectives on Gendered Bodies
  • GWST 335, Feminist Theory in the Humanities
  • GWST 495, Various selected topics

Last reviewed shim5/10/2013 5:29:38 PM

Contact

ART 258
Phone:  250-807-9625 
Fax: 250-807-8001
Email: ilya.parkins@ubc.ca

Community, Culture, and Global Studies
Irving K. Barber School of Arts & Sciences
University of British Columbia - Okanagan
3333 University Way
Kelowna, BC
V1V 1V7

Ilya Parkins