Katharine Crompton, Yarwood Grant winner 2012

In 2012, Katharine Crompton, an MA History of Design and Material Culture student at the University of Brighton was awarded the Yarwood Research Grant for her research on ‘English Missionaries in Chinese Dress: Hudson Taylor and the Dress Policies of the China Inland Mission, 1854-1880’.

The China Inland Mission (CIM) was founded in 1866 and was the first mission organisation to have as policy that all its missionaries must wear Chinese dress. 

 

Katherine shared: "Handing in my dissertation at the end of September was a great relief!  Having set myself a rigorous schedule of a certain number of words per day I was not in too much of a hurry at the end, though of course as soon as I had handed it in I kept thinking of ways in which it could have been improved. My tutors were very helpful in providing a balance of encouragement and focused constructive criticism, and having two points of view was helpful, especially as my topic was one which spanned several widely different areas of interest. I would like to express my gratitude to the Costume Society for enabling me to travel so much back and forth to the School of Oriental and African Studies, where I had access not only to the full China Inland Mission archives, but to the entire SOAS library collection, which contains many hard-to-obtain works pertaining to my topic. The Yarwood Award also provided assistance with having my dissertation printed and bound. The experience of researching for and writing my dissertation has been fascinating and (mostly) enjoyable. I have learned so much both about my topic and about the process of archival research and writing an independent work."

Katharine received a Distinction for this dissertation.