Who's who

Co-Convenor, Material & Visual Culture Research Group

BA(Hons) History & Theory of Art (University of Essex), PhD (University of East London)

Keywords: History and theory of art, architecture and design; visual and material culture; domestic architecture and design; suburbia; Ideal Home exhibition; 20th century historical pageants; spectacle; Tudorism; communities.

Academic interests/teaching themes

I currently teach on BA(Hons) Three Dimensional Design and BA(Hons) Textile Design. My teaching is largely drawn from the disciplines of Design Studies, History and Theory of Architecture and Design and Visual & Material Culture. I cover a range of issues cognate with studio practice including sustainability, emotional design, user-led design, gender, amateur production, industrialisation and manufacturing, consumerism and ethnography.

Research interests

My research is on the experience of modernity in the twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on design and visual culture, spectacle, space, performance and communities. I have recently contributed a chapter to British Design from 1948: Innovation in the Modern Age (eds. C. Breward & G. Wood, 2012) that accompanies the V&A's exhibition of the same name, for which I am also on the advisory panel.

I am currently working on the material culture and design of the home and domestic space for The Inter-War Home: The Design and Decoration of the Suburban House in England, 1918-1939, to be published by MUP, and a revised edition of my book The Ideal Home Through the Twentieth Century (1997), for which I have been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for 2012-13. This was also the subject of my PhD ‘The Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition and Suburban Modernity, 1908-51' (1995) and ‘Ideal Homes' that I curated for the Design Museum in 1992.

I have published several articles on the revival of historical pageants and spectacle in Britain, the US and the British Empire in the twentieth century. My chapter in The Edwardian Sense: Art, Design and Spectacle in Britain, 1901-1910, eds. M. Hatt & M. O'Neill, Yale University Press (2010) brings together my research on both the Ideal Home exhibition and historical pageants in a wider discussion of the relationship between spectacle, the public and the crowd. I also have longer standing research interests in British women artists and surrealism.

Academic/industry background and industry links

I joined University College Falmouth in 2007 as Senior Lecturer in Histories & Theories of Design. Having started my career as a curator at the V&A Museum, I went on to lecture at University of Wolverhampton, University of East London, University of Ulster and Loughborough University. I have also held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in Cultural and Historical Geography at Royal Holloway. I was academic convenor of 'The Politics of Design', the Design History Society annual conference, University of Ulster, 2004. I am a member of the AHRC's Peer Review College. I am co-convener of the Material and Visual Culture Research Group at University College Falmouth. I have appeared in, and given advice to, television and radio programmes drawing on my research on the history of the home. I have also written for newspapers and magazines. In 2012-13 I will be undertaking a number of knowledge exchange activities with Media-10, owners of the Ideal Home Show, as part of my British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship.

Recent outputs

• 'Workshop of the World? Manufacturing the British Product' in British Design from 1948: Innovation in the Modern Age, ed. by C. Breward & G. Wood, V&A Publications (2012), pp. 265-283
• 'Living in a "Half-baked Pageant": The Tudorbethan Semi and Suburban Modernity in Britain, 1918-39', Home Cultures, vol. 8, no. 3 (2011), pp. 217-244
• ‘Spectacle, the Public and the Crowd: Pageants and Exhibitions in 1908', in The Edwardian Sense: Art, Design and Spectacle in Britain, 1901-1910, ed. by M. Hatt & M. O'Neill Yale University Press (2010), pp. 43-71

Selected earlier outputs

• ‘"Pageantitis": Visualising Frank Lascelles' 1907 Oxford Historical Pageant', Visual Culture in Britain, vol. 8, no. 2 (2007), pp. 63-82
• ‘Performing Irish-American Heritage: the Irish Historic Pageant, 1913', in Ireland's Heritages: Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity, ed. by Mark McCarthy, Ashgate (2005), pp. 105-120
• ‘"All the world and her husband": the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, 1908-39' in All the World and Her Husband: Women in Twentieth-Century Consumer Culture, ed. by M. Andrews & M.M. Talbot, Cassell (2000), pp. 10-22
• ‘"The man who staged the empire": remembering Frank Lascelles in Sibford Gower, 1875-2000' in Material Memories: Design and Evocation, ed. by J. Aynsley, C. Breward & M. Kwint, Berg (1999), pp. 159-179
• ‘Staging the imperial city: the Pageant of London, 1911' in Imperial Cities: Landscape, Space and Identity, ed. by F. Driver & D. Gilbert, Manchester University Press (1999), pp. 117-135
• The Ideal Home Through the Twentieth Century, Hazar (1997), 175 pp.

Current projects/forthcoming outputs

• The Inter-War Home: The Design and Decoration of the Suburban House in England, 1918-1939, Manchester University Press (in progress, 2014)

Membership of learned societies/subject associations

• Design History Society

Editorial boards

• Member of the editorial board of Journal of Design History, 2004-2010.

External examiner

• MA Contemporary Design, Sotheby's Institute of Art, London (validated by University of Manchester), 2009-2013, External Examiner
• BA(Hons) Art & Design (all courses), Buckinghamshire New University, 2006-9, External Examiner for Historical and Cultural Studies Dissertation Element
• BA(Hons) Packaging; Fashion; Fashion/Textiles; Textiles and Surface Pattern, Somerset College of Arts & Technology, Somerset College of Arts & Technology, 2003-6 (validated by University of Plymouth), External Examiner for Visual Culture

Supervision of research degrees

• Damon Taylor (Director of Studies), ‘Design Art Furniture at the Boundaries of Function: Communicative Objects and Performative Things', 2011
• Angie MacDonald (Director of Studies), ‘The Restorative Paradigm: Gardens and Well-being', 2009-
• Jason Cleverly (Second Supervisor), ‘A Practice-Based Examination of Applied Design Sensitivities for Interaction and Interpretation in Museums and Art Galleries', 2011-

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