Helen Persson Swain is a Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities / Art History Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership-funded PhD candidate at University of Glasgow in the history of art department. Her research focuses on the trade and fashionable use of Chinese painted silks in eighteenth-century Britain. The object-based PhD research is developed from her twenty years curatorial expertise in Chinese textiles, mainly at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Bringing together the usually separate studies of fashion and textile history, and drawing on material culture methodology, her doctoral project entitled “Chinese Painted Silks: Craftmanship and Fashion in the Eighteenth Century” studies how the Chinese had far more agency in the design, production, and trade of this material than has previously been acknowledged. She has lectured internationally, for example in China, Japan, and the US, and has published extensively on the subject, notably “Orientalism in Swedish Fashion,” 100 Years of Longing for the Orient (2023) and “Chinese silks in Mamluk Egypt,” in Global Textile Encounters (2015). She is a board member of the International Association for the Study of Silk Road Textiles and the Costume Society, UK.