History of Design and Material Culture MA

Course structure

The History of Design and Material Culture MA draws on the wide-ranging academic expertise of staff in the fields of the history of decorative arts and design, dress history, material culture, museology and social history.

It stimulates innovative and interdisciplinary study in the history of design and material culture in both their western and non-western contexts, considering the relationship between local, national and international patterns of production, circulation, consumption and use.

The course is delivered through a combination of lectures, seminars, study visits and tutorials. Considerable emphasis is placed on student involvement in the weekly seminar readings and discussions within the two thematic core modules, Exploring Objects and Mediating Objects.

Based at Pavilion Parade, a Regency building overlooking the famous Royal Pavilion, teaching takes place close to the seafront and city centre amenities.

Syllabus

Exploring Objects

The Exploring Objects module introduces you to a series of different research methods and historiographical approaches, as you interrogate and make sense of designed objects in terms of how they are designed, produced, circulated, consumed and used in everyday life. It covers the period from the late eighteenth century to the present time and typically involves discussion and debate on the following themes, theories and methods: Marxist and post-Marxist historiography; production and consumption; gender and taste; phenomenology; object-based analysis; the use of archives; and 'good writing/bad writing'. It also introduces you to the academic rigour of postgraduate dissertation research.

Mediating Objects

This module complements Exploring Objects by focusing on the mediation between 'this one' (the object itself) and 'that one' (the object as represented in word and image). On one level, it examines how objects are translated in various texts and contexts, from museum and private collections to photographs, advertisements, film and fiction. On another level, it examines how objects are transformed through the embodied processes of everyday rituals such as gift-giving and personal oral and collective memories. The module therefore deals with the idea of intertexualities and how the identities of things and people are phenomenologically bound up with each other. By extension, you examine objects in relation to ideas concerning sex, gender, class, generation, race and ethnicity.

Dissertation

The centrepiece of your MA studies, the dissertation is a piece of original writing between 18,000 and 20,000 words on a research topic of your own choosing. It allows you to pursue a specific research topic related to your own academic and intellectual interests in a given area of the history of design and material culture, for example fashion and dress, textiles, ceramics and glass, product design, interior design and architecture, graphic communications, advertising and photography, film, museums, collecting and curating, and design pedagogy. The dissertation is largely based on primary research, often using specialist archives and surviving historical material.

Previous dissertations include:

• FHK Henrion, Crawfords and Advertising for Harella: The appropriation of Surrealism in advertising to women, 1939-45
• Text and Photography in Lee Miller’s World War Two Work for Vogue
• A Kiss from France: Embroidered silk postcards and separation during the First World War
• The Artificial Dentures of Civilised Humanity: The material culture of porcelain false teeth in Britain, 1820-1920
• People and Place: A study of consumption sites and gentrification in Hackney
• This Book belongs To...: The origins and narratives of the early children’s book collection at the Jubilee Library, Brighton

Brighton Health and Pleasure poster, early twentieth century. Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove.

BOAC poster by FHK Henrion, late 1940s. University of Brighton Design Archives.

Facilities

This course makes use of the University of Brighton Design Archives, which include the archives of the Design Council, Alison Settle, FHK Henrion and the South of England Film and Video Archive.

Close professional contact with national institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as with local collections and centres of historical interest (such as Brighton’s unique Royal Pavilion and Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, with its internationally famous collection of decorative art from the 1890s onwards), present research opportunities for students registered on the course.

The course is closely linked to our arts and humanities research division through a joint research lecture series, and we have successfully encouraged high achievers to register for the MPhil/PhD programme.

The student environment also includes the thriving postgraduate Design History Society as well as opportunities for conference presentation, professional contact and career development in the field.

University of Brighton Design Archives

Student views

Ellen Martin

"During my time on the MA course at Brighton, I learned to look at objects in an entirely new set of ways.

"The dissertation module in particular proved an invaluable opportunity to really engage with an area of design history that I grew to be deeply passionate about – interwar textiles and pattern design. This research process, which led me to archives and libraries that I never knew existed, was the most enriching and fulfilling thing I have ever done.

"The course gives you the freedom to shape your own unique interests, but as part of a close-knit and supportive group of equally enthusiastic peers."

Location

Campus where this course is taught

Accommodation

Maps

Accommodation

University building

Grand Parade campus map