Meet the team

Nicola Ashmore's research interests focus on artistic interventions and curatorial practice, notably the means through which this can leverage collaborative activism.

She has made use of film documentary and digital technology as methodologies, investigating museum practices, community artists and collaborative practices. She is currently researching remakings of Picasso's Guernica.

Dr Harriet Atkinson is a historian of design and culture with an interest in uses of design for propaganda, nation-building and diplomacy, from the 1930s to the present day. From February 2019 to January 2023 Harriet is on research leave as AHRC Leadership Fellow and Principal Investigator on the project '"The Materialisation of Persuasion": Modernist Exhibitions in Britain for Propaganda and Resistance, 1933 to 1953'. This builds on her recent University of Brighton Rising Stars Award (2017-18), for a project entitled 'Information, Persuasion, Citizenship: Public Exhibitions 1914 to now'. 

A Professor of Design History, Jeremy Aynsley researches in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century design in Europe and the United States, with a particular focus on design in modern Germany.

Professor Jeremy Aynsley’s research interests concern late-nineteenth and twentieth-century design in Europe and the United States, with a particular focus on design in modern Germany. He is especially interested in the phenomenon of the migration of Modernism, avant-garde and commercial visual languages in graphic design, as well as the education and professionalisation of the designer. A further research specialism is in the history of the domestic interior and its representation through publication and exhibition.

Jeremy Aynsley writes and lectures on twentieth-century design and culture. Publications include Graphic Design in Germany, 1890-1945 (2000) and Designing Modern Germany (2008). He has also contributed to several exhibitions. Most recently, he was guest curator of Julius Klinger: posters for a modern age at the Wolfsonian, Florida International University in autumn 2017.

He was curator of Signs of Art and Commerce: German graphic design 1890–1945 in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1997 and co-curator with Marianne Lamonaca of Print, Power and Persuasion: Graphic Design in Germany 1890–1945 at the Wolfsonian, Florida International University in 2001. In 2009-11, he contributed to the exhibition and publication California Design, 1930–1965: ‘Living in a Modern Way’, a project led by Wendy Kaplan of the Department of Design and Decorative Arts at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

Simon's current research interest is the history of jewellery and metalwork in relation to the culture of modernism. His book Jewellery in the Age of Modernism 1918-1940: Adornment and beyond is published by Bloomsbury (2019).

Sue is interested in the diversity of perspectives on the theory and practice of archives, bridging discourses of archive studies and other humanities disciplines, promoting greater cross fertilisation for mutual enrichment and new insights. Her engagement takes place at the intersection of stewardship, research and creative activities, involving a range of approaches to the notional and physical archive.  In both analogue and digital forms, this work in essence reflects on the place and nature of archives in contemporary culture.  Specialising in visual arts archives, her current particular research interests include archival materiality, and practices of archival selection.

Sue’s art and design history research focuses on the collections with which she works: twentieth century British art and design and their contexts, with a particular focus on the mid-century.  Current research includes work on the archives of émigré designers; she has recently published on the design advocacy of the art historian Kenneth Clark, a founding member of the Council of Industrial Design whose archive is held at the Design Archives.  She has worked closely on the archives of the architect Joseph Emberton and the designer HA Rothholz, and is currently working on that of designer FHK Henrion. 

Cheryl Buckley is Professor of Fashion and Design History with a special interest in relationships between gender and design within the context of feminist theories and design history.

Exploring the ideas underpinning the production, dissemination and consumption of design broadly conceived, Cheryl's expertise covers women's roles in ceramic design, fashion and its role in shaping feminine identities, and the ordinary and everyday in relation to design.

Recent research supported by an AHRC Fellowship returned to the theme of the ordinary to explore the ways in which fashion is embedded in everyday lives. This project undertaken with Hazel Clark at Parsons School of Design in New York  resulted in a jointly authored book, Fashion and Everyday Life: Britain and America, 1890-2010 published in 2017. An interest in gender and feminism has been intrinsic to Cheryl’s practice as a design historian, and she remains committed to indisciplinarity and the questioning of dominant narratives about history. In 2018, her keynote at the Beyond Change symposia in Basel organised by the Swiss Design Network led to the article 'Made in Patriarchy II: Researching (or Re-searching) Women and Design', Design Issues, vol.36, no.1, Jan 2020. This returned to the themes of one of her first research contributions to debates about women, gender and design, 'Made in Patriarchy: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Design', Design Issues,  vol.3, no.,2, Fall 1986.

Duncan Bullen is Deputy Head of School, in the School of Art at the University of Brighton, where he has responsibility for leading Research and Enterprise. He is the Director of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing.Duncan's own research interests are grounded in the materiality of manual drawing. He is concerned with tactile, repetitive, reductive, non-representational drawing strategies which he aligns with the practice of mindfulness meditation. Duncan is interested in how drawing mindfully may communicate spatially and physically as a means to trace the immediacy of lived experience, through tactile, sensory and contemplative engagement with the world. With this comes an interest in arts-health and the interchange between well- being and well-doing in which the lived body, mind and environment are part of the same process of phenomenologically enacting one’s world at a transactional, integrated and visceral level.Duncan’s research aims to contribute and build upon discussions that position drawing as phenomenology, and he situates his research within a comparative context that draws on a convergence of thinking from Eastern and Western philosophies and Japanese aesthetics. Duncan places particular value on practice-based research, which situates drawing within a first person, experience-based methodology ‘whereby theory emerges from a reflexive practice at the same time that practice is informed by theory’ (Bolt 2007).

Verity Clarkson is a design historian whose research explores the role of post-1945 exhibitions, trade fairs, art historiography and other cultural contacts in the context of the cultural diplomacy of the Cold War. Her work examines transnational connections with a focus on British perspectives  - arts organizations, government bodies and audiences – on these sites of contest and collaboration. She is also interested more generally in post-war popular culture, nostalgia and second-hand consumption.

I work across the fields of Middle Eastern studies, visual and cultural politics and design history. My research is concerned with the intersections of visual culture, design and political conflict, with a particular attention on Lebanon and the Arab world. My investigation is historically focused on post-1945 anticolonial struggles, transnational anti-imperialist solidarities and violent conflicts, as complicated by a global Cold War order. I approach the Middle East less as a discrete area study but rather as a political geography interconnected with global conditions of modernity, (post)coloniality, war and conflict.

Dr Angelica Groom is an art historian who undertakes research into the cultural history of animals in relation to the early modern court. Her research centres on the history of animal depiction in diverse visual contexts, including early modern zoological illustrations, still life paintings, as well as imagery related to the ritual uses of animals in courtly hunting, pageantry and festivals. Related areas of investigation include elite collecting practices of rare and exotic beasts, both as living beasts displayed in menageries and princely gardens, and as taxidermied specimens exhibited in the Cabinet of Curiosity or Wunderkammer. Her research interests thus connect with numerous fields of scholarly enquiry, including animal studies, art history, garden design and architecture, collecting and early museum studies, court festivals and pageantry, and early modern naturalism.

Yunah Lee's research interests are focused on the key themes of modernity, modernism and national identity in design and material culture and engaged with how these ideas have been developed and materialised within a national design context and translated and appropriated across cultural and national boundaries. 

East Asian Modern Design

Yunah’s recent research focus is on the development of East Asian design and design history since 1945. As a co-steering member of two AHRC Network Scheme projects, ‘Translating and writing Modern Design Histories in East Asia’ (2012-14) and ‘Fashion and Translation: Britain, Japan China and Korea’ (2014-15), Yunah has taken her research in the areas of Korean graphic design and fashion, investigating how modernity in Korean design emerged from the interactions with Euro-America, while being characterised by inter-regional interventions within East Asia, and how Korean designers and critics engaged with global innovation and creativity during the course. She is interested in building connections and networks with academics and practitioners working in the area of Korean design as well as Asian design. 

British Modern Design and National Identity

Yunah’s doctoral research, titled ‘Selling Modern British Design: Overseas Design Exhibitions by the Council of Industrial Design 1949-1971’ focused on the series of overseas design exhibitions organised or participated in by the Council of Industrial Design between 1949 and 1971. Through the reconstruction of these exhibitions, the research positioned the CoID’s exhibitions in the context of British government exhibition policy and national publicity and reviewed the notion of good design and commerciality in the period of 1950s and 1960s. Through careful inter-reading of texts and images, Yunah analysed and reconstructed the contents and styles of exhibitions and re-evaluated the principles and style of good modern British design promoted by the CoID. Yunah’s study revealed that a constant tension existed between traditional images and heritage, dominant and popular representation of Britishness, and the contemporary and modern aspects of Britain idealized by the CoID in its own design exhibition, therefore, contributed to debates about the diverse aspects of British identity and its representation through design exhibitions. 

Retail design: department store

Yunah’s research titled ‘Design for Profit: Barkers, Derry and Toms and Pontings during the Interwar Period’ dealt with the role of design in retail business. Through looking at changes in architecture and displays of three department stores in London during 1920s and 1930s, the study pondered upon the slogan of ‘design as a marketing tool’ and how identity and modernity was represented and perceived in various visual tools in retail design. The application of the Art Deco style to exterior and interior space and the new marketing campaigns, especially the use of posters, was interpreted in the theoretical frame of modernity and Modernism in British architecture and design during the interwar period.

Dr Charlotte Nicklas is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Art and Design. Her main research interest is the history of dress, fashion, and textiles in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but she is interested in all aspects of the history of dress and textiles and, more broadly, material culture and the history of design. She approaches these histories through objects, images, and texts. At the centre of her research is the way in which dress and fashion both influence and reflect the cultural concerns of a particular historical period. Particular interests include the history of colour in clothing and fashion and fictional representations of dress and fashion.

My research interests align along two related axes, which are my subject specialisms in nineteenth-century British art and culture, and the history of art museums and art collections. In both trajectories my key concern is how gender and related social formations (sexuality, the nation, the modern) organize the production and circulation of visual images. A key focus for me is portraiture, which proves a particularly rich seam of material in British and related visual culture, but I have also enjoyed working outside my period specialization in collaborations on feminist-informed projects relating to art exhibitions, collections and museums.

Dr Annebella Pollen is an academic working across a range of interests in material and visual culture. Her research areas include mass photography and popular image culture, and histories of art, craft, design and dress. 

Annebella leads the Academic Programme in History of Art and Design (BA Hons History of Art and Design; BA Hons Fashion and Dress History; BA Hons Visual Culture; BA Hons Philosophy, Politics, Art; MA History of Design and Material Culture; MA Curating Collections and Heritage). She is also Deputy Director of the university's Centre for Design History.

Louise Purbrick’s current research examines how the past remains present in its material forms. She has a longstanding interest in the Long Kesh/Maze prison site, the now empty ‘icon’ of ‘The Troubles’ located ten miles south of Belfast, and has spent many years documenting the transformations of its cell units, the H Blocks. Her recent work as part of the Traces of Nitrate project, an interpretation of the abandoned architecture of mining in Atacama Desert in northern Chile and the legacies of the nitrate trade in Britain, is in publication.

Louise completed her D.Phil in Art History at the University of Sussex in 1993 and has since published much of her study of the industrial and material culture of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in articles and edited collections. Her exploration of the power of objects began with the fascination for the Crystal Palace but has since extended to museum practices and the material culture of everyday life. In The Wedding Present (2007, 2014), a contemporary analysis of the gift, she detailed the acts of preservation that constitute domestic domains and argued that consumption was not an adequate framework through which to view everyday life. Broadly, then, Louise is concerned with the entanglements between people and things, with human and material relationships.

Alongside research and writing, Louise works as a curator and maker. She is a member of the Re-making Picasso’s Guernica Collective and has worked with Healing Through Remembering on exhibition projects. In 2010, Brighton Museum and Art Galleries accessioned the collection from which she curated Rattling the Cage (2009), a community archive of documents, textiles, photography and film used in a campaign to free a Guantánamo detainee. Most recently, she worked with the Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP) on Art, Refuge and Resistance, an exhibition of documents and designs about the current conditions of refugees.

Dr Megha Rajguru lectures in the history of art and design with research interests in South Asian design and material culture, museum collections and exhibitions. In particular, her research focuses on postcolonial and transnational design histories and addresses the ways in which design has been produced, displayed and consumed within India and beyond. Her current research is particularly concerned with international development and the shaping of Indian design between 1970-1990. As such, she has published on the development of the design curiculum at the Industrial Design Centre, IIT, Mumbai under the aegis of industrial development in the 1950s through partnerships with UNESCO and Japanese designers. She is currently studying housing design within the context of national and international development in India from the 1970s onwards.

A common strand in Megha's research is the geopolitics of design and decolonial approaches to writing design histories. She has been working on collaborative projects that examine Asian design and modernity, colonial postcard production and circulation between India and Britain, and ethnnographic displays in museums.

Megha’s PhD (2010) was a study of the curating of Indian religious artefacts in British museums and galleries. It examined interpretive practices surrounding intangible qualities of material sacred objects. The research makes a contribution to the study of curating objects of worship, an ongoing debate in museum studies, and offers alternative modes of curatorial thinking that are closely aligned to art practice.

Claudia Treacher is a doctoral researcher working on material and visual culture. Her research areas include art and politics during the Second World War in Britain, conscientious objection, and family history. Claudia is a member of the Centre for Design History and the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories.

Anna Vaughan Kett is an academic working across a range of interests within material and visual culture studies. Her research interests centre on political expressions through dress, and primarily the work of Quaker women anti-slavery activists in Britain and America in the nineteenth century. She is currently researching further into Quaker women, textiles and dress, the Free Produce Movement, and British women’s activism against slave-grown cotton goods during the mid-nineteenth century. Current projects include further investigation into ‘free’ cotton cloth produced in Manchester and Carlisle, the packages of aid sent by Quakers to freed slaves in Kansas and the humanitarian work of the Quaker shoemaking Clark family of Street, and their extended kinship networks in Britain and America.

Her research areas include histories of craft, design, textiles and dress; Quaker and non-conformist histories, and their approaches to dress; abolitionism and women’s role; the material culture of abolitionism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; political and dissenting dress; the production of slave-grown and (non-slave) free-labour cotton and the production of hand-woven cotton. 

Anna teaches on the Academic Programme in History of Art and Design (BA Hons History of Art and Design; BA Hons Fashion and Dress History; BA Hons Visual Culture; BA Hons Philosophy, Politics, Art; MA History of Design and Material Culture). She also teaches Critical Studies on the BA Hons Fashion and Textiles and BA Hons 3-D Design and Craft. She is a member of the university's Centre for Design History and Objects Unwrapped Research Group; Museum Lab at University College London; the Quaker Studies Group at the Religious Society of Friends, London.

My doctoral research focusses on the barriers to museum participation faced by the South Asian community in the UK, analysing the processes museums employed in exhibition design and development in order to reduce these barriers. The research draws on two museum exhibitions, ‘East comes West’, held at Cartwright Hall in Bradford, 1971 and ‘The Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms’, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, 1999.

Dr Claire Wintle is a historian of exhibitions, museums and collections, with a particular interest in curatorial practice, exhibition design and the politics of representation. Her work explores the relationship between museums and processes of nationalism, imperialism and decolonisation, often with a focus on South Asia.

Claire is Principal Lecturer in Museum Studies and Art and Design History. She is the Course Leader for the MA Curating Collections and Heritage, a collaborative masters programme developed between the University of Brighton and Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove. Her teaching focuses on the ethics of contemporary museum practice, with an emphasis on widening participation in and access to cultural heritage. She is a member of the Management Board of University of Brighton's Centre for Design History and co-leads the Centre's academic strand on 'Museums, Archives and Exhibitions.

Claire’s early research focused on nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial collecting and display in and of South Asia, with a particular focus on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. She is currently working on two projects within a broader research agenda that examines the impact of exhibition and museum-making on imperialism and post-independence nation building during the middle years of the twentieth century.

- The first project focuses on curatorial practice in the UK between 1945 and 1980, using archival research and oral histories to consider how curators with responsibility for ‘ethnographic’ or ‘world cultures’ collections grappled with the professionalisation of their field, post-war recovery and the ‘end’ of empire. Claire is particularly interested in the lessons that can be learnt from historic examples of international networks, repatriation and exhibition making in our current ‘decolonising’ moment.

- The second project examines post-independence exhibitions of India in the UK and US (1947-1986), with an emphasis on shows generated by South Asian artists, designers and curators. Claire is especially interested in how exhibition making and cultural diplomacy probed the limits of national identity for cultural practitioners.

Claire is also in the process of initiating a new major interdisciplinary research project entitled ‘Curating Challenging Collections’. This will explore how museum practitioners today can cultivate professional resilience while working with historic collections associated with traumatic events and processes such as slavery, colonialism and sexual abuse. Working with professional associations and museums, as well as scholars and practitioners of health, cultural memory, and material culture, the project builds on Claire’s recent projects on curating decolonisation and colonial collecting to address the contemporary legacies of historic injustices in museums. The project is designed to support the wellbeing and mental health of a stretched museum workforce and contribute to improved working environments for curators, as well as support wider audience and community access to the collections themselves.