Abigail McGowan is an assistant professor of South Asian History at the University of Vermont.  Her first book, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (Palgrave 2009), explores the politics of crafts and craft development in colonial western India.  She also is the coeditor of a volume of essays on consumption in colonial India entitled Towards a History of Consumption in India (Oxford University Press, 2010), and the author of articles on Indian crafts, design, and consumption which have appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, the Journal of Material Culture and elsewhere.  Her current project explores changing ideas about home and family in western India through the material history of domestic interiors between 1900 and 1960.