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Charlotte Ann Jirousek (20 August 1938 – 12 February 2014) was an associate professor of textiles and apparel in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University. She was also the curator of the Cornell Costume and Textile Collection.

Early life
Charlotte was born in Faribault, MN. After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology from Hamline University in 1960, she served in the Peace Corps, in the village of Comlekci, Turkey, where she remained until 1969. Her experiences and learning about Islamic textiles, weaving and dress would provoke a lifelong interest in the country and inspire much of her later research and writing. For several years after, she lived in Minneapolis with as a social worker and later as a fiber artist, organizing craft fairs as a part of the Minneapolis weaving and crafts community.

Career
Charlotte's earlier exposures shaped her academic focus towards the influence of Islamic, especially Ottoman, textiles and dress on European fashions and the interaction between the two. After completing an M.A. in applied design, and a PhD in design, housing and apparel, she spent several years as an assistant professor and curator at the University of Alabama before joining the Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design at Cornell University in 1992.

During this first year, Charlotte began a survey of vernacular textile production and trade in the Anatolia region. On the forefront of computer technology during the early 1990s, in 1995 she developed an open-access comprehensive online textbook to accompany her first course. This was Cornell's first electronically published book, which is still in use today. She also served as Director of Undergraduate Studies and her contributions led to significant changes in the curriculum. As a curator of the Cornell Costume and Textile collection, having over 9,000 items of apparel, she curated over 30 exhibitions, and with the creation of the online catalog, made the collection easily accessible to her students, scholars and the public.

She maintained contact with Turkish weaving communities and continued research through fieldwork, making her last trip in 2013, the same year she was appointed for a five-year term as the editor of Dress.

Charlotte has also made numerous entries, essays and articles appearing in a variety of publications, and completed a book manuscript shortly before her death. Following the structure of her course, it was intended to reexamine the history of dress within the context of Western interaction with the world, from the Crusades through the 20th century. The book is to be published in 2017. Her work has been crucial to recognizing the often unacknowledged relationships between the Ottoman Empire and the Western world through dress,