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Mentored Research

Students frequently work with faculty members on important scholarly projects.  The following projects were funded by the Fulton Chair.


Historic Clothing Collection


  • Mary Farahnakian - Curator
  • Awarded June 2005
  • For further information, contact: mary@byu.edu

Our department currently maintains BYU/TMA Historic Clothing Collection. This valuable collection features more than 6,000 items dating from the end of the eighteenth century to the present. The collection could have tremendous value to scholars and historians but, until now, it was inaccessible to those who could most appreciate and use it as a resource. Using Fulton Grant money, the TMA Department has created a searchable online database of the clothing collection---a virtual museum of all the clothing articles it contains. This online collection online will be one of the first online research references available for historic clothing.

This database, which will be published online in the next year, was created by five graduate students under the tutelage of Mary Faranakhian.  These student spent a considerable amount of time researching, photographing, and archiving all of the clothing in the collection.  These skills and experiences will be extremely important to them in their future careers.

This resource will be useful to many clothing scholars and costume designers.  The online catalogue will also be of value to church historians because the collection contains clothing owned by important figures in church history such as George Q. Cannon and Brigham Young. Furthermore, the collection will be a helpful resource for genealogists. Family historians occasionally come across photographs of their ancestors and contact the Historic Clothing Collection to find out if the date of the photograph can be ascertained by the clothing they are wearing. Clearly, this database will be a blessing to both the scholarly and the LDS community.

On February 27, 2006, Mary Farahnakian wrote:

As a member of the faculty of the Department of Theatre and Media Arts at Brigham Young University, I am writing especially to thank you for your generosity, thoughtfulness, and attention in support of education for the students in our department.

The Fulton funding to the BYU/TMA Historic Clothing Collection last year helped us to develop our website, which enriches our department by making us more globally acknowledged as a research resource for costume designers, historians, and especially students. The information we have collected is recorded as an electronic archival catalog, which is in process of being transferring to our website. The material researched for this website also gives us the opportunity to publish this information in a hard-copy catalog, which will be sent to prestigious museums around the world.

I also appreciate our department for being so sensitive as to spend the Fulton funds for the benefit of educating students and our larger community of learners. Thank you again for providing us this educational opportunity for our students.

Most sincerely,

Mary Farahnakian

Last modified: September 07, 2006 Maintained by CFAC Webmasters.

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