Associate Professor, School of the Arts (SOTA)
(PhD, University of Pennsylvania)

Office: Togo Salmon Hall (TSH) Room 425
Mail: TSH 414, McMaster University
1280 Main St. West, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4M2, Canada
Phone: 905-526-0261 x 23156
Email: shenga@mcmaster.ca

Angela Sheng teaches art history and integrated Arts (iARTS) at McMaster University.

Having trained in haute couture at Ecole Cotnoir-Capponi and in weaving and textile analysis at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and the Centre International d’Etudes des Textiles Anciens, she began her academic career as a curator of East Asian textiles at the Royal Ontario Museum. She then freelanced as a cross-cultural consultant while living in Asia with her diplomatic family and initiated her research on the early Silk Road.

She also started researching on issues of indigeneity and was invited to curate the exhibit and catalogue Writing with Threads: Traditional Textiles of Southwest Chinese Minorities. She has published, lectured, and curated museum exhibits on many related subjects from antiquity to now. She specializes in interpreting costumes and textiles—their art, technology, and culture—for their substantiation of social relations and in the context of interculturality.

Supported by a multi-year Insight Grant from the Social Sciences of Humanities Research Council of Canada, her current book project focuses on agropastoral nomadic contributions to knowledge transmission in Eastern Eurasia from 300 BCE to 500 CE.