Who are we

I am fascinated by design and seek opportunities to expand and diversify the discipline. I am motivated by systemic complexity and disciplinary ways of knowing. Areas of particular interest are social innovation and sustainable futures, morality and ethics in design, interdisciplinarity, and collaboration.

My research activities seek to achieve social benefit through design. My approach to research is practice-based and generally conducted in collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines.

Research projects conducted in pursuit of these ambitions include:

“Anticipating Futures: Forecasting and Climate Preparedness for Co-located Hazards in India (ANTICIPATE)”. Partners: University of Brighton (UK), Institute of Development Studies (UK), All India Disaster Management Institute (IN). Funder British Academy, Knowledge Frontiers Scheme.

‘Inter-Disciplinary Education Agenda (IDEA): An essential driver for innovation’, Funded by the EU TEMPUS scheme. This project helped to improve knowledge exchange and innovation between engineering and design disciplines and business, in higher education institutes.

‘The Human Body Form’ A collaborative arts/medicine pedagogic research study investigating the potential benefits of drawing as a method for inter-disciplinary learning.

‘Designing for the Future’ a multi-disciplinary design competition that seeks to develop design innovations to benefit an ageing population, sponsored by The Future Perfect Company.

'Using Biomechanical data to inform student learning about chair design.' The study, which aimed to develop innovative models for interdisciplinary teaching, was funded by the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning through Design (CETLD).

The successful completion of this project led to a second CETLD-funded research study titled: 'Design in the Clinical Environment.' The project was a further development of the interdisciplinary teaching model identified during the previous research and moved the focus from the chair to the built environment.

I am an External Reviewer for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC); and Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA).

Tilo Amhoff is interested in the social, economic, and political conditions of the social labour process of the production of architecture and the built environment, especially its regulatory frameworks and its relations of production, such as the relation between the intellectual work of planning and the manual work of building. He is currently working on the manuscript for a book entitled The making of plans: Germany, 1862- 1932, which explores architectural, urban, and economic plans, and searches for the beginnings of the plan as instrument and product of regulation, organisation, and administration. Tilo Amhoff has a lasting interest in the written legal and technical documents architects produce and use, which started with his research of the transformations of building contracts, including legal obligations, building specifications, and working drawings, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in England. His most recent project explores the agenda and challenge of Marxist architectural history and theory in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the context of the student movement, and a vital reminder of a time in which students were the producers of their education, critiquing the education they were presented with and independently developing alternative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary modes of learning.

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 art and design. Until July 2023 she is Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow and Principal Investigator on the project '"The Materialisation of Persuasion": Modernist Exhibitions in Britain for Propaganda and Resistance, 1933 to 1953'.  She co-leads Centre for Design History's research strand on Graphic Design Histories (with Professor Jeremy Aynsley).

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.

Before taking up the appointment, Jeremy Aynsley was Professor of History of Design at the Royal College of Art (RCA), where he was also Director of Research since 2009. He was responsible for the College’s strategic development of research including the submission to the Research Excellence Framework 2014.

Jeremy Aynsley has been member of a number of external advisory boards including the AHRC Peer Review College (2005-2013). Recipient of several major research grant awards, he was Director of the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior (RCA, V&A Museum and Royal Holloway University of London) from 2001 to 2006 and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project The Viennese Café and fin-de-siècle culture from 2006 to 2009 (RCA, and Birkbeck University of London). Jeremy Aynsley has overseen the successful completion of seventeen PhD and four MPhil studentships. 

Professor Aynsley is a graduate of the University of Sussex (BA, MA) and the Royal College of Art (PhD). 

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. 

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 visual and cultural politics and design history with a particular attention on Lebanon and the Middle East. 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.

I began examining the intersections of visual culture, war and conflict in my first monograph, Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (IB Tauris 2009). Excavating unexplored archives and suppressed narratives of wartime Lebanon, I have argued for an understanding of political posters as discursive sites of a complex hegemonic struggle where imaginaries, desires and anxieties of antagonistic political subjectivities, under formation and transformation during wartime, are visually articulated, contested and battled over. I have also curated the related travelling exhibition, entitled Signs of Conflict (Beirut 2008; Istanbul 2009; Sevilla 2011; Thessaloniki 2011; Umea 2012; San Francisco 2013), and folded the various outputs of this project into a bilingual (Arabic and English) online archival resource http://www.signsofconflict.org. The project has won six funding awards; and the book has been widely recognized by peers as a pioneering study (see book reviews here). 

My new book, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut's Global Sixties (Cambridge University Press 2020), revisits the relations between visual culture and politics from global and postcolonial perspectives. Drawing on uncharted archives of everyday printed matter, my study sheds light on hitherto understudied graphic design practices and modes of translocal visuality attached to print technologies. I critically engage this material beyond nationally circumscribed frameworks of analysis to examine instead the mobility of modernist cultural forms, discourses and practises within the disjunctive flows of Beirut’s long 1960s, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. My enquiry reveals key cultural transformations that saw the city develop as a Mediterranean site of tourism and leisure, a nexus between modern art and pan-Arab publishing and, through the rise of the Palestinian Resistance, a node in revolutionary anti-imperialism. Cosmopolitan Radicalism was awarded The Design History Society Research Publication Grant in 2019 and is the co-winner of the 2021 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize for best scholarly work in Middle Eastern Studies published in the UK.

I am currently completing a new book, co-edited with Dr Cathy Bergin and Dr Francesca Burke, entitled Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the Global Sixties, forthcoming with Manchester University Press. This book excavates forgotten histories of solidarity which were vital to radical political imaginaries during the long sixties. It decentres the conventional Western loci of this critical historical moment by instead foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. This volume of essays is based on the successful conference ‘The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politics and Histories of Solidarity’ we convened at Brighton (27-29 June 2019).

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.

Interdisciplinary Research, centred primarily in Dress History, Theatre History and Material Culture. Specialist in historic Theatre Costume, particularly from the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

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.

Twentieth century fashion especially elite and British fashion. Wartime fashions, the Utility scheme, Inc.Soc (the Incorporated Society of the London Couture), the influence of Paris and the contribution to fashions by refugees from facism is a particular interest explored in the 2020 book Paris Fashion and World War 2. Global diffusion and Nazi Controls co-edited with Brighton Professor Emerita Lou Taylor. The post-war devlopment of fashion education in the UK, espcially at St Martin's School of Art, now CSM (Central St Martins) and its alumni Gibb, Galliano, McQueen and Chalayan, was the focus of my 2010 PhD Muriel Pemberton and the development of degree level fashion education.

Current work includes a chapter on Bill Gibb for a publication with Bloomsbury and Aberdeen Museums. And the British tailor-made, with a particular interest in the House of Creed.

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.

Dr Ceren Özpınar is a historian specialising in art, visual culture, historiography and exhibitions in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her research focuses on the relationship between gender, identity and art since 1960 with a special focus on Turkey and the Middle East. Ceren's research interests lie in three key areas: Revisiting art histories; investigating transnational feminist alliances in the wider Middle Eastern geography; and an examination of curatorial strategies and discourses of large-scale exhibitions, such as retrospectives and biennials, in the Global South.

Ceren's research has received funding from British, American and Turkish learned societies and research bodies (British Academy’s Newton International Fellowship, 2015; Getty Foundation’s CAA Program Award, 2016, 2017 and 2020; TUBITAK's Doctoral Research Fellowship, 2013). In 2020, Ceren was awarded a Rising Star, which is one of the University of Brighton's research awards, for her project "Where Matter Meets Memory: Alternative Political Futures in Kurdish Art Today.” Ceren's project investigates the creative works produced within the diasporic Kurdish communities.

Publications

Ceren's latest book, a co-edited volume titled Under The Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from The Middle East and North Africa Today, is published by Oxford University Press and The British Academy in 2020 (Read the reviews in Oxford Art Journal, Third Text and Woman's Art Journal). Her first monograph The Art Historiography in Turkey (1970-2010), which stemmed from her doctoral thesis, was published in 2016 by Tarih Vakfi Press. She is currently completing her second monograph, which is also forthcoming with Oxford University Press and The British Academy. This book investigates the relationship between art history and women artists in Turkey, and is based on her Newton research project entitled "Re-visiting Feminist Temporalities in Art and Art History in Turkey from the 1970s onwards." Ceren's latest articles appeared in the Art Journal, Art in Translation, Art & the Public Sphere, and Third Text.

My research interests broadly concern issues of inclusivity in the history of art, art museums and art collections, as well as a subject specialization in nineteenth century visual culture with a focus on portraiture. My primary concerns are how gender and related social formations (sexuality, the nation, the modern) organize the production and circulation of visual images. I have applied feminist methods to research on the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries including through a number of collaborations with artists, curators and cultural organizations.

Dr Annebella Pollen is an academic with interests in material and visual culture. Her research areas include mass photography and the popular image, and histories of art, craft, design and dress, especially marginal, alternative and non-canonical forms.

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's central research interests are: South Asian design and material culture, museum collections and exhibitions. In particular, her research focuses on postcolonial and transnational design histories and addresses  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 curriculum 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 writing on 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, postcolonial visual cultures, 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 votive artefacts. 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.

Hannah Rumball is a senior lecturer and an academic working across a range of interests in dress history and material culture. Hannah teaches on, and is coordinator for, Critical Studies on the BA (Hons) Fashion Business, BA (Hons) Textiles and Business and BA (Hons) Fashion Communication and Business. She is currently working on research into the tailoring of the late-nineteenth century women’s waterproof overcoat the Ladies Ulster for the EU research project The RIG (Research Interest Group), for Appearances, Bodies and Societies. She has worked on projects for the National Trust and The Regency Town House, and has worked as a costume mounter, researcher and lecturer.

Her research areas include nineteenth and early twentieth century women's dress, with a particular specialism in Quaker Plain dress and its fashionable adaptation. Hannah was awarded her PhD in material culture, dress history and Quakerism, from the University of Brighton in 2016. Her doctoral subject was conceived independently, after having completed an AHRC fully-funded Masters by Research at Kingston University on the subject of the prescriptions of Quaker dress. Subsequent consultations with appropriate academics at the RCA, Kingston and Brighton University, as well as independent scholars, ensured the creative and innovative quality of her proposal and illustrates Hannah’s strong cross-discipline collaborative ability. Both the RCA and University of Brighton accepted her proposal, with University of Brighton awarding her a fully-funded studentship position to undertake the doctoral project.

Her research has a particular focus on object analysis and material culture and has taken her to museums and collections across the country. There she has read, used and analysed archival material in both tangible and digitised formats, varying from exquisite fragile garments from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to Quaker religious manuscripts from the seventeenth century.

Other areas of interest for Hannah include suffrage dress, nineteenth century dress reform, womens tailoring, waterproofing, Herstories, feminism and feminist readings of history, the use of fur, feathers and skins in fashion, aestheticism, embroidery, and the relationship between dress and religion with a particular focus on protestant readings of Scripture.

During the summer of 2018, Hannah visited Uganda where she undertook research into local textiles with a particular focus on the production of bark cloth in Masaka, a traditional region of its production. She has donated examples of these studied Ugandan textiles to the University of Brighton Dress History Teaching Collection to further the University’s repository of international textiles, and to broaden the scope of source material available to the student cohort for inspiration and study.

Hannah is a founder member of the international C19th Dress and Textiles Reframed network, a group of dress/textile/fashion historians who have found common interest in rethinking some of the common perceptions, and misperceptions, about dress and textiles in the long 19th century. They hold free monthly online, international 'At Home' symposiums where researchers showcase their latest research, providing a community where like minded dress historians come together to share and debate fresh ideas in the field. She is also a member of the university's Objects Unwrapped Research Group; the Association of Dress Historians; DATS; The Costume Society and the Quaker Studies Group at the Religious Society of Friends, London.

Hannah is currently supervising a PhD with the working title, "How Women in Asylums in Nineteenth Century Britain Found Their Voice: Protest and Subversion Through the Art of Needlework."

Dr Tim Satterthwaite is active in two research areas, both of which are represented in his first book, Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal (Bloomsbury, 2020). The first strand concerns the history of photo-illustrated magazines in the early twentieth century: Modernist Magazines is built around case studies of UHU and VU, two of the leading popular titles in interwar Germany and France. Current projects include a special issue of the Journal of European Periodical Studies for which he is guest editor; a proposed edited volume, Magazines and Modern Identities, is currently under peer review.  A second research strand explores the Gestalt tradition in visual studies and the theoretical implications of the current science of perceptual organisation. This will be the subject of Tim Satterthwaite's second authored book, Pattern Theory, for completion in 2023-4.

My current research interests centre upon how our physical experience of the world co-incides with our cultural, social and political relationship to designed objects. What can be described as 'design sensibilities' can in this sense be said to describe a relationship to design that relies upon the senses rather than the rational analysis of the made environment (Hendrix and Fulton Suri, 2010). With the development of User-Centred approaches to design in the 1990s, there has been an increasing appreciation of the idea that the things we make and use can as much be about feeling as practical function. In the past twenty years our perceptual relationship to design has increasingly moved to centre stage in the discourse of design. However, this idea that design engages us in such a way has tended to emphasize ‘product experience’ and ‘engagement’ in relation to concepts such as usability, and this approach sought to render emotion and sensual experience of design quantifiable and measurable, yet my contention is that it is based on an ontological assumption. This is the idea that there is a ‘normal’ or typical human neurological phenotype, that ‘we’ all respond in more or less the same way to stimuli and thus experience design in a similar manner. My current research is thus a challenge to this received wisdom.

Recent work on the history of emotion suggest that far from ‘feeling’ being a set quality of the human animal in response to its environment, rather such responses are culturally specific (Watt Smith, 2016). Similarly, developments in the field of cultural neuroscience have thus begun to demonstrate how activities such as seeing, touching, hearing and taste are not fixed qualities of a given physiology, but the result of biological processes meeting social ones (Lin & Telzer, 2018). At the same time research into the nature of embodied cognition, how thinking is not just a quality of the brain but something that is distributed throughout the organism, is coming to suggest that the way we ‘understand’ the world is actually a process of making sense that is not just situated in the body but arises out of being an embodied self. In recent years knowledge developed in the study of conditions such as Autism, ADHD and dyslexia have come to emphasize how the way people perceive the world is not homogeneous but diverse and multifaceted. Thus the paradigm of ‘neurodiversity’ is one which suggests that how we perceive the world varies both within and between social groups, whereby it is a form of human diversity ‘that is subject to the same social dynamics as other forms of diversity (including dynamics of power and oppression)’ (Walker 2019). This therefore has profound implications for the practice of design, and is a area of knowledge and practice that has yet to be systematically explored. One of the central strands of my current work is therefore an investigation into the  theoretical dynamics and practical ethics of design that acknowledges neurodiversity in the context of embodied cognition. I am also very interested in the changing dynamics of embodied pub cultures.

PhD Completions

Speight, Catherine (2018) Looking, Understanding and Making Meaning: Higher Education Ceramics Students as a 'Community of Learners'

Marmont, Giovanni, (2019) Nanopoetics of Use: Kinetic prefiguration and dispossessed sociality in the undercommons

Sanchez-Moreno, Lilian (2020) Towards Professional Recognition: Social Responsibility in Design Discourse and Practice from the Late 1960s to the Mid 1970s

Rowland, Suzanne (2020) The role of design, technology, female labour, and business networks in the rise of the fashionable, lightweight, ready-made blouse in Britain, 1909-1919

Bailey, Jocelyn (2021) Governmentality and power in 'design for government': an ethnography of an emerging field

Current Supervision

Farrelly, Liz. Making a museum: Documenting change at the Design Museum, London, 1979 to 2016

Abbas, Shahid. Agency in Generative Design

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 and the UK.

Claire is Principal Lecturer in Museum Studies and Art and Design History. She is Co-Director of the University's Centre for Design History where she leads research, including on the museum as a designed space that is both produced and consumed. 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.

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. Her monograph is entitled Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. 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. With Ruth Craggs, she edited Cultures of Decolonisation, and has published widely on this theme. With her students, Kate Guy and Hajra Williams, she recently organised the major international conference Museum Exhibition Design: Histories and Futures, which also developed some of this work. The proceedings will be published by Routledge as Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum: Makers, Process and Practice, with contributions from scholars, designers and museum professionals from Argentina, China, France, Germany, India, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the UK and US.

- 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.

• PhD title: Collecting and displaying Korean contemporary craft and design at the V&A (1919-2019)
• Twentieth- and twenty first-century East Asia design and architecture
• Design education and pedagogical practices
• Design futures
• Digital design
• Modernities
• National identity
• See more: www.zara-arshad.com

Kate is a current Phd Candidate funded by Techné.

The working title for her research is: Curatorial collecting practices and the collection of twentieth century clothing, 1970-onwards, with a case study of Worthing Museum and Art Gallery, UK.

Worthing Museum and Art Gallery has been identified as having one of the largest collections of dress and fashion within the UK.[1] While its collecting policies and practices have been identified as ‘atypical’[2], the collection has often been recognised as ‘a gem’[3] with a particularly strong collection of shop bought and home-made twentieth century clothing.[4] Using the ‘atypical’ policies and practices of Worthing Museum as a case study to explore curatorial collecting practices surrounding the acquisition and documentation of twentieth century fashion, from 1970 onwards, this research aims to build a deeper understanding of museum collecting of fashion.

The main research questions are:

• What can an examination of holdings of twentieth-century clothing within the collection at Worthing Museum, along with an assessment of collecting policies and practices, reveal about fashion collecting from 1970 onwards in UK museums? 
• How can analysis of past collecting practices inform the future development of museum collecting of fashion?

These questions will help to address critiques of curatorial practices in two ways. Firstly, those that suggest that fashion collecting, and curatorial practices of the past, are not meeting the demands of present researchers. Secondly that curatorial practices of documentation, classification and terminology may not be adequate for representing all sectors of contemporary society.[5] These issues are relevant to publicly funded museums today as they review and assess their holdings, justify their existence and navigate through a period of change and limited resources.

Current objectives of the research:

1. Collect detailed information about the twentieth century collecting practice in museum collections of fashion, with a particular case study on Worthing Museum.
2. Capture individual experiences of curatorial practices collecting fashion, with a particular case study on Worthing Museum. 
3. Contextualise individual curatorial practices within a wider museums context and produce an assessment of the impact of curatorial choices on collections.

Kate was awarded a Techné work placement as a Curatorial Assistant with the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection in February 2020, which has been put on hold due to covid-19.

Kate also teaches Critical studies on the BA (Hons) Fashion and Business, BA(Hons) Textiles and Business and BA(Hons) Fashion Communication and Business courses and is a Casual Museum Learning Assistant at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery. She is a member the Universities Centre for Design History, the Objects Unwrapped research group and the Association of Dress Historians (DATS) and Worthing Museum and Art Gallery Education Planning Group.

[1] Ann Wise, Hidden Treasures: Worthing Musuem and Art Gallery. Embroidery2004. 34-35. Print, Worthing Theatres and Musuem, "Costume Collection Worthing Theatres and Musuem," 31/8/2020.

[2] Charlotte Nicklas and Annebella Pollen, Techne Collaborative Doctoral Award Expression of Interest Form. University of Brighton and Worthing Museum and Art Gallery. University of Brighton, 2018. 3. Print.

[3]  Lou Taylor et al., Dress Collections in Musuems and Other Instituitions in the South, South East and South West of England. . Second ed. Brighton: University of Brighton, 2018. Print.

Lou. Taylor, Establishing Dress History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) 

[4] Musuem, "Costume Collection Worthing Theatres and Musuem."

Charlotte Nicklas and Annebella Pollen, Collecting Everyday Fashion: Worthing Museum’s Twentieth-Century Costume Collections. Collaborative Doctoral Award Advertisement. University of Brighton, 2018. Print.

[5] Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, Fashion and Everyday Life: London and New York (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) , Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, "1," In Search of the Everyday: Museums, Collections, and Representations of Fashion in London and New York, Heike Jenss Bloomsbury, 2016) , Catriona Fisk, "Looking for Maternity: Dress Collections and Embodied Knowledge," Fashion Theory 23.3 (2019), Cicely Proctor, "Collecting Clothes Worn by Trans People and the Curatorial Ramifications," Fashion Theory 22.4-5 (2018):

Kate’s AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with British Museum examines the histories and legacies of professional exhibition design practice at the British Museum (BM). By exploring the processes behind the scenes and examining the intentions, activities, experiences and the impact of the “people who make” exhibitions, this project hopes to reveal hidden and forgotten design histories. She uses oral history and archival research methods supplemented by participant observation to provide a rich body of evidence that the museum sector and scholars will be able to use to understand how broader museum exhibition design practice has developed and evolved in the UK.

Jayne Knight is a PhD student researching the Kodak Collection at the National Science and Media Museum. Re-evaluating popular photography in the museum, the Kodak Collection forms the centre of her AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with the National Science and Media Museum. The project examines how the history of popular photography can be told in the museum today, following dramatic changes in photographic industry and practice. This project will contribute to new histories of photography through reconsiderations of the impact of popular photography.  

Jayne's research interests include popular photography, photographic history, design history, material and visual culture. 

Lina Shinhwa Koo's research interest is focused on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century design history of Korea, Japan, and China, especially in the domains that intersect crafts/designed objects, handmade/mass-produced, and traditional/modern. Implementing interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research methods, Koo is interested in interrogating colonial visual politics and the construction of national identities traversing various mediums and genres with discourses on modernity, coloniality, and decoloniality. 

Lina Shinhwa Koo's PhD dissertation is a comprehensive study of East Asian ethnic dolls from the early twentieth century and how the material culture relates to global tourism, colonial labour system, and identity politics.

Áine McKenny is a PhD researcher based in the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories and the Centre for Design History at the University of Brighton. Her research interests include gender, history, art, conflict and the display of these subjects in exhibition spaces. Her current research examines how women’s experiences of the Troubles in Northern Ireland are presented within exhibitions on the conflict. Outside of her studies, she has professional experience working for archives and art galleries in administration, curation, events, education and research.

My doctoral research examines the material and intellectual contributions made by individuals of South Asian heritage to the British Museum from 1753 to the present day. This research seeks to broaden the understanding of how the Museum's collection was and continues to be formed and understood.

Through the examination of objects and collections donated or sold to the Museum by individuals of South Asian descent and associated archives, this research seeks to contextualise these contributions within the British Museum's wider collecting history to understand the relationship shared by these individuals with the Museum and the rationales behind their contributions. 

Nicola is currently researching for a PhD. Her working title is:

'A revolution in children's clothes? Crafting change: Clothkits and the revisioning of an English pastoral tradition, 1969-1990'.

Nicola has had access to the private archives of the Clothkits founders for her research and has contributed to a forthcoming book on the history of Clothkits. Her research is based on oral testimony in order to capture individual experiences of adults who as children wore Clothkits clothes, and adults that made and bought Clothkits for their children.

Nicola has a degree in Textile Design focusing on print and has worked both as a freelance textile designer specialising in designs for children's clothes and as an illustrator. She previously completed a creative practice MA in Textiles at Brighton on the subject of unspoken issues affecting women.

Her interests include children's clothes from the 1960s to present, clothes as a creative educational tool, women designers, feminism, craft, folk art and handmade clothes.

My Ph.D. research focuses on exploring how individuals relate to heritage sites on a sensory, embodied level. Attending to more-than representational affective expressions of everyday interactions with space and place, this work aims to contribute to an understanding of how and why individuals connect to, or reject these strategic sites. 

Working through the terms and concepts of 'community' 'space' and 'place,' this research acknowledges the important roles that heritage sites can play in drawing together disparate and connected networks of individuals to facilitate current and future connection to their environment.

My interdisciplinary methodology applies an enactive approach to traditional forms of ethnographic research. Adopting the eye and sensibilities of a theatre scenographer to read how a site's location, architectonics and cultural identity, engender particular atmospheres that affect how individuals become enmeshed on a phenomenological level with built history and imagined futures.

Located in the School of Humanities this Design Star AHRC funded research aims to offer alternative and inclusive ways of thinking around how heritage sites can be designed and developed. 

I am interested in how contemporary museum exhibitions represent histories of European colonialism and how these histories are engaged with by audiences. I assess what role museum exhibitions in Europe play in mediating how people engage with the colonial past.  Many European museums are currently experimenting with exhibiting colonialism, yet are guided by an ill-defined discourse of decolonisation. My research contributes to an understanding of what decolonising in the museum means in practice by focusing on the impact of exhibitionary practices on audiences, which has been neglected in museum studies and practice.  My research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.  

Alex’s research is broadly concerned with graphic design’s potential as a process of political and cultural opposition, with a specific focus on the post-1960s Netherlands. His PhD research centres on the politics of identity in 1980s Amsterdam, as seen through the posters of graphic design collective Wild Plakken.

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.

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.