Turkey Red Papers is an ongoing series of essays and other presentations (2018 – projected 2040) that explores technology, sciences, trade, cultural adaptation, labor relations, colonialism, and fashion in global history. I take an “I Spy” approach to connect those and other topics to Turkey red or the specialized production processes with which it was inextricable throughout global history (Lowengard 2022). Each component of Turkey Red Papers depicts changing ideas about the relationships between the natural and manufactured worlds. Each incorporates an aspect of Turkey red production or use to connect those ideas to specifics of time, place, or condition. In creating a discontinuous global history connected by color, Turkey Red Papers brings detail into a broad world picture and builds on knowledge from multiple disciplines in innovative ways. I have written about Turkey red since the 1990s; Turkey Red Papers permits me to bring those pieces together and take them in new directions.

The project also shows a way to expand color studies from its often narrow and discipline-specific approaches to build a field that more fully integrates its multi-disciplinary foundations within the humanities and the sciences. Although not always recognized as a discrete area of inquiry, for two decades, color studies conferences and publications have brought together anthropologists, architects, artists, biologists, color forecasters or marketers, industrial and craft color-makers, engineers, historians (of art, material culture, science, and technology), philosophers, linguists, literature specialists, scientists, technical art historians, and technicians to explore confluences. Turkey Red Papers presents a new way to think and write about color in the combined philosophical and material worlds that contribute to the general goals of the community and support its scholars.