Who we are

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.

Dr Nicola Ashmore is a Principal Lecturer in Art and Design History. Her research and curatorial interests include collective remakings of Picasso’s Guernica for social change and creative practices for sustainable international development. She is committed to working collaboratively and developing international networks of artists and institutions interested in progressing the use of arts and culture for social change.

Nicola has made use of film documentary and digital technologies as research methodologies, investigating collaborative art practices and site-specific community artworks. She has published in several journals and has enjoyed co-authoring various publications.

Dr Harriet Atkinson is a historian of art and design, with a background in curating, heritage funding and policy. She is interested in art, design and dress for propaganda and protest; government engagements with art and design; art, design and cultural diplomacy; the development and professionalisation of design practice; and histories of exhibitions and world's fairs.

Harriet is Course Leader for the MA Curating Collections and Heritage, a collaborative masters programme developed between University of Brighton and Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove. She is part of the project team for the new Trans-Atlantic Platform project Graphic Design Histories for Creative Dissent: Archiving and Ethical Challenges, running from September 2024 to August 2027, funded through FAPESP, NRF and UKRI. The project team is Prof Teal Triggs, Royal College of Art (P-I); Dr Harriet Atkinson, University of Brighton; Assoc. Prof Priscila Farias, University of Sao Paolo; Assoc. Prof Deirdre Pretorius, University of Johannesburg and Dr Lee Scharnick-Udemans, University of the Western Cape. 

Other current projects include a collaboration with leading curator and cultural strategist Clare Cumberlidge to develop new public engagement from her research into art and design activism in Britain, 1933-53 and the short documentary Designing from Home, co-directed with Sue Breakell and made with Banyak Productions about 35 Pond Street, the London house of designer F.H.K. Henrion, which was both the family home and the office for an expanding design practice over 40+ years. She is also writing a new book, Lost and Found: the biography of a photo album, exploring personal photographs and the politics of memory, reflections sparked by a family album returned to Harriet by a stranger in 2022 and a viral tweet.

Harriet was Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow and Principal Investigator (2019-2023), leading the project '"The Materialisation of Persuasion": Modernist Exhibitions in Britain for Propaganda and Resistance, 1933 to 1953'. This resulted in the book Showing resistance: propaganda and Modernist exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53 (Manchester University Press, 2024); a chapter for co-edited book British Writing, Propaganda, and Cultural Diplomacy in the Second World War and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2024); a chapter for co-edited book Exhibitions as Interiors (Bloomsbury, forthcoming); the co-edited book Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges Through Art, Architecture and Design from 1945, with Dr Verity Clarkson(Brighton) and Dr Sarah Lichtman (Parsons) (Bloomsbury, 2022), an article about Misha Black's networks through exhibitions (Journal of Design History, 2021), podcast series Graphic Interventions (available on Soundcloud, ITunes, Google Podcasts and Spotify) and documentary film Art on the Streets.

Art on the Streets was co-directed with Jane Dibblin, narrated by Michael Rosen and made with film charity Four Corners. The film launched in September 2023 and has since been shown in Berlin, Porto, Izmir, San Francisco, Brighton, London and beyond. Until July 2025, it is being screened at Tate Britain as part of the exhibition Artists International Association: the first decade. View Art on the Streets' trailer here. The film has garnered several awards and nominations at international film festivals including: Nominee, Learning on Screen Awards 2024; Official selection, Festival Internacional de Cine de la No-Violencia Activa (FICNOVA), 2024; Winner, 'Best Documentary Short', Luleå International Film Festival Sweden 2023; Winner, 'Best Documentary for Peace', Bridge of Peace Film Awards 2023; Winner, 'Best Documentary Short', California International Shorts Festival 2023; Finalist, 'Best Short Documentary', New York International Film Awards 2023; Finalist, Berlin International Art Film Festival 2023; Official Selection, Berlin Women Cinema Festival 2023; Official Selection, Miami Women Film Festival 2023; Official Selection, LA Independent Women Film Awards 2023; Official Selection, Cinecity Brighton Film Festival 2023; Nominee, Tokyo International Cinema Awards 2023; Official Selection, History Arts and Sciences International Doc Fest 2023. Cultural historian Professor Joanna Bourke described Art on the Streets as: ‘A documentary for our times. Aesthetically beautiful, politically gripping, and inspiring', while Financial Times Architecture and Design critic Edwin Heathcote described it as 'a life-affirming view of the capacity of art and design to provide hope in the darkest circumstances'.

Sue is interested in interdisciplinary perspectives on visual arts archives in theory and practice, bridging discourses of critical archive studies and other humanities disciplines. 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, she works collaboratively with scholars, art and design practitioners, collections practitioners and community groups, using a range of approaches. Her work investigates the archive as both a product and a site of creative practice, and looks ‘under the bonnet’ of art and design historical research and asks: what is the archive doing?  To this end, her research is often grounded in the embodied practitioner knowledge generated from the collections with which she has worked, largely focussing on twentieth century British art and design and their contexts, particularly the mid-century.  So for example she has reflected on the archival practices of emigre designers, and on materiality in the encounter with the visual arts archive.  She has particular expertise on the archive and work of the designer FHK Henrion (1914-1990), held at the Design Archives.

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.

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.

Alex Nora Esculapio is a lecturer in Historical and Critical Studies for the BA (Hons) Fashion Business, BA (Hons) Textiles and Business and BA (Hons) Fashion Communication and Business. Her research interests include historical and contemporary cultures of (un)sustainability, environmental history and humanities and queer ecologies. 

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.

My research interests are largely within Hollywood film history, especially around stars and stardom, movie magazines, performance, genres (especially romantic comedy, the female Gothic, melodrama and horror), and film costume, on all of which topics I have published. My current writing projects are around the linked histories of movie magazines and Hollywood stardom, and the female Gothic. 

Dr Uschi Klein's current research focuses on photography as a form of cultural resistance in communist Romania (1947-1989). Her research is contextualised within the broader understanding of decolonising the Western photography canon to broaden the knowledge by including marginalised and under-represented perspectives. Uschi's recent publications include an open-access article in the journal Miejsce, a chapter in the volume The Camera as Actor (Routledge 2020) and articles in academic journals, such as Visual Studies (2021) and Visual Communication (2020).

Yunah Lee's research interests are design history, visual and material culture in Korea and East Asia, transnational and cross-cultural studies of modernity and modernism, representations of national and personal identities, and political agencies of art, craft, design and fashion.  

East Asian Modern Design

Yunah’s research focus is on the development of East Asian design and design history since 1945. She has taken her research in the areas of Korean graphic design, interior spaces, 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. Her research explores 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 and Asian design and visual and material culture.

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.

Darren Newbury’s principal research interests lie in the relationship between photography, history, politics and cultural memory, with a particular concentration on Africa, and South Africa specifically. Significant publications include: Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (2009), a major monograph on photography during the apartheid period and its place in post-apartheid memorialisation; People Apart: 1950s Cape Town Revisited (2013), a photobook based on the rediscovered collection of photographer Bryan Heseltine; and The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies (2015), co-edited with Christopher Morton, a volume exploring new methodological approaches to researching and curating the photographic archive, in addition to its specifically African concerns. He has also co-edited a Special Issue of Visual Studies on ‘Photography and African Futures’ (2018) with Richard Vokes, which through a series of case studies examines how and why, from early colonial times onwards, states, institutions, political parties, civil society organizations and individual citizens used photography as a means for representing various kinds of imagined futures. In addition to academic publications, he has curated exhibitions at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011-12) and District Six Museum, Cape Town (2013-14), based on his photographic research.

He has also researched and published on the history of British documentary photography, photographic education and community photography practices. He has a long-standing interest in visual research methods and was editor of the international journal Visual Studies from 2003 to 2015.

He has recently edited a volume on Women and Photography in Africa, with Lorena Rizzo and Kylie Thomas; and his monograph Cold War Photographic Diplomacy: The U.S. Information Agency and Africa was published by Penn State University Press in 2024.

In 2020, he received the Royal Anthropological Institute Photography Committee Award for his distinguished contribution to the study of photography and anthropology.

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, community, and art since 1960 with a special focus on Turkey, the Middle East, and their diasporas. 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 been supported externally by the British Academy, College Art Association (CAA), the Getty Foundation, Association for Art History (AAH), and the Turkish Research Council (TUBITAK). Internally, 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 creative works produced within the diasporic Kurdish communities. In 2023, Ceren was awarded the Kickstart Fund, which provided her with the much-needed teaching relief to complete her second monograph. 

Publications

Ceren's latest book, which is her second monograph, Art, Feminism, and Community: Feminist Art Histories from Turkey, 1973-1998, is published in November 2024 with Oxford University Press. This book has been supported by the Association for Art History, the British Academy, and Brighton's Centre for Design History. It investigates the relationship between art history, women-identifying artists, and their lives and communities, building on her Newton research project entitled "Re-visiting Feminist Temporalities in Art and Art History in Turkey from the 1970s onwards" (2015-17).

Her co-edited volume titled Under The Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from The Middle East and North Africa Today, was 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 the History Foundation (Tarih Vakfi) Press.

Ceren's latest articles appeared in the Art Journal, Art in Translation, Art & the Public Sphere, and Third Text. She wrote several essays for edited volumes and special issues on invitation, including Image & Text (ed. Schmahmann), A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (eds. Jones & Davidson), and Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960-1985 (eds. Kennedy, Szymanek & Mallory).

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.

My research focuses on postcolonial making practices, considering the relationships between people, place and object.

Annebella Pollen is Professor of Visual and Material 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.

Dr Megha Rajguru's central research interests are: Design and material culture in South Asia, museum collections and exhibitions. In particular, her research focuses on decolonial strategies in design history writing, and transnational design histories, addressing ways in which design has been produced, displayed and consumed within South Asia and beyond. Her current research is particularly concerned with international development and the shaping of design in India between 1947-1985. 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 design in India within the context of national and international development from the 1950s 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.

Dr Suzanne Rowland is a lecturer in fashion and dress history in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton. She is a material culture scholar and interdisciplinary theorist with broad research interests in fashion design, manufacturing, and cross-class consumption from the early nineteenth century to the present day. With a background as a costume maker in film and theatre, she is particularly interested in how dress is manufactured and its corporeal relationship to the body. Her AHRC/Design Star PhD research investigated the design and wholesale manufacturing of women’s fashionable blouses during the 1910s through material culture, Actor-Network Theory, and storytelling.

Suzanne is a committee member of the following research networks:

Centre for Design History, University of Brighton Centre for Design History

‘Tailored Clothes for Women’ research project supported by University of Brighton and European Research group Apparences, Corps et Sociétés http://gis-acorso.com/  

19th Century Dress and Textiles Reframed https://c19thdressandtextilesreframed.wordpress.com

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.

Please see this link for my up to date research profile https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/sally-sutherland

I am an art historian specialising in contemporary art and visual culture, with a particular focus on East Asia within wider regional and global contexts. My research addresses the representation of memory and the intersection of performance and protest cultures, and centres on the political agency of practices that grapple with legacies of war and occupation, histories of violence, and colonial erasure.

Prior to joining the University of Brighton, I co-led the MA in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. As a current member of the department of Critical and Historical Studies at Kingston University, I teach on the BA Fine Art and Fine Art and Art History courses. My AHRC funded PhD thesis exploring the intersection of postwar memory, feminism and art activism in Japan in the 1990s through the lens of pioneering feminist Yoshiko Shimada’s archive and broader East Asian women artists’ networks was completed at the same institution. I hold an MA History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art and BA (Joint Hons) History of Art and English from the University of York.

In addition to the independent projects which I have collaboratively realised with artists, I have worked in the areas of exhibition curation and curatorial research, public programmes, visual arts grants management as well as press and public relations with organisations including the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, Solomon R. Guggenheim New York, Singapore Art Museum, National Arts Council Singapore, and Art Forum Berlin. My writing has appeared in publications including the Oxford Art Journal, n.paradoxa international feminist art journal, ArtAsiaPacific and documenta 12 magazines.

Lou Taylor is spoken of by dress historians worldwide for her inspirational teaching and her pioneering position within the development of object-focused dress history. When she retired to become a Professor Emerita in 2017, she had taught at the University of Brighton for over forty years, founding the dress history teaching collection and launching the careers of many influential curators and historians.

Her former students now form a global network of experts, working in institutions for the teaching, researching, curation and collecting of costume, dress, textiles and fashion. Each of them takes Lou Taylor’s enthusiasm and professionalism forward, spreading ever further the mission that began in Brighton in the 1970s.

Lou Taylor started her career as an assistant at the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, in 1964, and following a move to Brighton in 1966, taught first at Central St Martins then began to teach at the Art College in the early 1970s, along with a role as curator of costume at the Brighton Museum. Her long career would find outlets for her expertise in publishing, teaching, supervising and curating. She focused on the development of critical approaches to the discussion of the objects of clothing in their historical, material culture and museology settings, devoted to enhancing a flow of respect between collection/museum work and the university history/critical theory worlds. Her first book Mourning Dress, A Costume and Social History was published in 1983.

She wrote an account of her views on dress history methodologies and the collection, display and interpretation of dress in museums, in her two books: The Study of Dress History, 2002, and Establishing Dress History, 2005, both published by Manchester University Press. Establishing Dress History deals with the historiography of dress history and the creation and interpretation of dress collections in museums of every kind. Alyea, in the American Journal, Dress, 2005 noted: “[Lou Taylor] highlights just this: how do the conscious and unconscious aims of the curator or institution affect what is collected, what is excluded, and how a collection is maintained, studied and exhibited. The call to self-awareness is the fundamental lesson for future generations of curators.”

Lou Taylor’s application of material culture and consumption studies has positively transformed dress history. She is driven by the conviction that transdisciplinary approaches to the construction of history, including working with surviving garments, offers a fresh, close understanding of the cultural ‘eye’ of a specific period or community.

Her work has placed clothing/textiles and related archival documentation, into their specific design, manufacture and consumption context. Two sample projects are her research on fabrics printed in Lyons, during World War Two, which she deliberately presented in France. This work verifies, through analysis of imagery on surviving fabric samples, the all-too-close commercial and civilian support for the Pétain regime across France in 1940-44, (Lethuiller 2007). Her Costume Society 2007 Symposium paper presented the cultural biography of lace from the Polish Silesian Highlands. She has worked on national exhibitions and advised the V&A on the selection of dress for their ‘International Arts and Crafts’ exhibition, writing the text on this in the show’s related book, edited by Linda Parry and Karen Livingstone.

She has worked internationally with dress historians in New York, with Valerie Steele (FIT paper 2006); in Paris with Veillon and Ruffat of the IHTTP; (chapter, 2007 and conference paper, 2005); in Copenhagen with the Designskole (paper 2005); in Stockholm with the Swedish Ethnographers Association (Wiman 2005) and in Warsaw with the Polish Academy of Sciences (2002 ‘ Kultura i Spoleczenstwo) and Warsaw Academy of Fine Art (paper 2006). And by invitation she has worked with colleagues in Milan and in Paris – (the IHTP Dress History Group) on issues of design, material culture and national identity related to British ‘youthquake’ fashion in the 1960s.

Lou Taylor also jointly, with Eleanor Thompson and Amy de la Haye, curated and wrote the book Fancy and Fancy Dress – the Messel Dress Collection 1870-2004 (Philip Wilson, Autumn 2005) for Brighton Museum. She also has a longstanding interest in the history of the teaching of fashion in British art Schools, has been a regular book and exhibition reviewer for Costume, Fashion Theory and Textile History as well as making her own article contributions to these journals and other publications. Her work has also been published in France, Sweden, Poland and the USA.

For the occasion of the Brighton School of Art 150th anniversary in 2009 she contributed a chapter on the development of dress history:  Fashion textiles and dress history a personal perspective by Lou Taylor.

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

Dr. Julia Winckler's research sits across multiple strands:

Visual Culture, Photographic Archives

Memory, Migration, Contested Topographies, Exile Studies

Reactivating Archives through Artistic Interventions

Photography and Critical Pedagogy

Julia Winckler's research investigates archival traces within the context of collective memory and migration narratives and explores how neglected archival sources have the potential to reveal forgotten histories that can alter our understanding  of the past and present. Through the use of creative and interpretive visual approaches, using photography as a tool to think about historical experience, multiple articulations of memory and meaning are expressed, with the aim of generating new academic knowledge.

The author Ben Okri has described 'the artist [as] a conduit through which lost things are recovered' (2005); and Winckler's research methodology considers archival research as a material, embodied practice. Through extensive investigation in archival collections, material is gathered and a strategy is mapped out.  For her research projects, Winckler usually travels to the sites that hold cultural and historical significance.

Through reactivation and visualisation, using photography as the key medium, past memories are reframed and resituated in the present. Combining an archaeological with a genealogical approach, traces are documented; their significance to the present assessed, as some of the historical functions are lost or no longer important. The genealogical approach necessitates an investigation that starts in the present, a retracing of the journey, that is physical and experimental, setting up encounters and dialogues.

Lost and recovered narratives have been a key theme of Winckler's work to date. Memory and migration narratives of emigration (Two Sisters), exile and loss (Traces), exploration (Retracing Heinrich Barth), displacement (Leaving Atlantis), expedition/peregrination (My Canadian Pilgrimage) and interwar home-making (Fabricating Lureland)  have been visualized and probed using the language of photography. These projects have been disseminated through public exhibitions, at conferences, exhibition catalogue publications and public engagement workshops, as well as informing Winckler's teaching practice.

Over the past twenty years, Winckler has undertaken extensive work with and within communities in Hong Kong, West Africa, Canada and the UK to enable broader access to personal cultural heritage amongst disadvantaged areas and demographics. She has sought to improve inclusivity of knowledge production and to reanimate disconnected or underdeveloped narratives and histories. Oscillating between photographic and archival research, photography is mobilized to reconstruct collective memories and give them a renewed cultural presence.

Until August 2023, she was co-research lead, with Dr. Uschi Klein, for the Visual Culture, History and Memory strand at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories, UofB's  research centre.https://www.brighton.ac.uk/cmnh/index.aspx

https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/cmnh/our-activities/our-academic-themes/visual-culture-history-and-memory/

The Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories was discontinued in 2023, following, from its founding in 2008, a significant history of investigations into the complex relationships between past, present and future, foregrounding subordinate and marginalised history and memory in relation to official narrative, and focusing on questions of power, identity and experience. The archive of the centre's many years of seminars, conferences and initiatives is available at the online blogsite.

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 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 was the founding 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 museum labour, 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 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, Korea, Pakistan, Switzerland, the UK and US.

Claire was recently awarded an AHRC Research Networking Grant for the project 'Making Museum Professionals, 1850-the present' with Dr Kate Hill at the University of Lincoln. This new network will support and develop contemporary campaigns for inclusivity and fairness in the sector by investigating the historical roots of the museum professions and the structures that supported them.

- 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.

In addition, Claire is the current recipient of an AHRC Digital Pilot Skills Large Grant. With PI Karina Rodriguez Echavarria, she is setting up the Centre for Digital Skills in Visual and Material Culture designed to upskill the Arts and Humanities community in the creation, management, and use of multidimensional (2D/3D) digital media. 

Professor Jonathan Woodham is a leading figure in the development of the History of Design as an academic discipline, who developed pioneering design history courses at the University of Brighton, forming the internationally renowned Design Archives, and spearheading the institution’s reputation as a powerhouse of design historical research.

Having initially joined the Brighton College of Art in 1982 as course leader for the then new and innovative BA(Hons) History of Design degree, he was awarded his Professorship of Design History at Brighton in 1993, the year in which he also became founding Director of the Design History Research Centre. His first degree was in Fine Art (First Class, 1973) at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art, before he went on to take an MA in British Romantic Art under Professor Michael Kitson at the Courtauld Institute of Art (1974).

Jonathan Woodham was involved in curriculum innovation in design history from the mid-1970s, becoming closely involved with the Design History Research Group and the Design History Society, founded in 1977. He later played a key role in the establishment, in 1994, of what was to become the internationally significant University of Brighton Design Archives and was intimately involved with most of its subsequent major acquisitions.

He led the development of the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of Brighton School of Art in 2009, scripting and co-organising the central publication and exhibition, much of which supplies the history of art education in Brighton text included on this website.

I am a heritage professional with a specialism in Museum Learning and my research is guided by the values of empowerment, agency and collaboration with communities at the centre of the research. 

I am a PhD candidate in the EPSRC funded Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology (SEAHA) Centre for Doctoral Training. My doctoral project researches how the affordances of drone technology can facilitate agency in underserved communities, to connect with heritage places, collections and narratives.

I am interested in coproduction and codesign as equitable research practices that address the power imbalances between cultural institutions and left- behind communities; museums and social justice; creative methods in qualitative research; the role of drones and their new aesthetics in the reimagining of human geographies and spacial justice; identity and placemaking.

My PhD research project entails investigating the collection and display of Korean craft and design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1980-2004).

My research explores interdisciplinary representations of silence in traumatised women’s testimony, where silence acts as a protective mechanism. Gathering lost and silenced stories of Cypriot lacemakers and building on emerging feminist theory which positions silence as a rhetoric of the deliberately unspoken, I intend to develop a community pedagogy to witness silence, including how gaps may be heard, shared, and ultimately encourage voice. Just like the deliberate creation of holes, a defining feature of the lace, these silences are often intentional; conscious gaps embedded into the fabric of a story. ‘Lefkaritika’ is a style of lacemaking unique to rural Cyprus, where my paternal family is from. It inspired the tablecloth in Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and in 2009 was inscribed onto the United Nation’s ‘List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’, in recognition of its international significance and immediate threat to its survival.

Aurore Damoiseaux is a PhD student researching the political and social weight of dress at Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (1981-2000). Her research includes oral testimonies and object analysis to reflect on the use of dress objects at the camp in Greenham Common to embody the fight against nuclear weapons.

She is interested in dress as carrier of emotion and memory, and as tool to promote ideas and ideology. Through her research, Aurore explores themes such as the creation of alternative communities, feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980s, representations of women in mass-media, and the musealisation of political events.

Aurore is PGR Representative to the Fashion and Dress History strand of the Centre for Design History. 

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):

Isabel Duarte is a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton. Her current research engages with the intersections of graphic design history, feminist methodologies and decolonial studies of cultural production, with a focus on Portuguese graphic design history and Portuguese social context. Her doctoral research, with the working title, ‘Beyond the canon: Feminist revision of graphic design history in twentieth-century Portugal' aims to uncover and reframe the history of women graphic designers in Portugal, through the identification of figures and groups who have been ignored by the canon, documenting their practices through a combination of oral history, social context and historical or pedagogical perspectives, and in so doing exploring the factors which have caused their work to be overlooked.

This research is funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia.

Isabel Duarte has a degree in Communication Design and has completed a Masters in Editorial Design on the subject of self-publishing and critical discourse on graphic design. 

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.

My interests include film history, fan magazines, star images and propaganda. I am currently undertaking AHRC funded research examining the influence of British star images on audience behaviour during World War Two. 

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.

Ivonne is a decolonial scholar with a focus on sub-Saharan African material culture and art, museum histories and practice, and colonialism in Africa. She is a trained Art Historian and Anthropologist and therefore sees her practice as interdisciplinary. Much of her research is object lead focusing on object biographies and how material culture is a starting point for discussions around her broader research interests. Ivonne’s early research was focused on South Africa but this has shifted to a wider geo-political area. She is also interested in foregrounding scholars and cultural thinkers from this area in her work.

Her focus on museums began in her MA where Ivonne critiqued the disparities in knowledge produced about a nkisi displayed at the British Museum and the Songye people of Central Africa. This critique was centred around the use of labels and display in western museums. This was taken further in her MPhil which compared the display and labelling of South African beadwork at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg. Here Ivonne focused more directly on decolonial scholarship and philosophy as well using a detailed museum ethnography to unpack the role of colonialism in western museums. This research also challenged concepts of art versus ethnographic object and the validity of western museum practice.

Ivonne is currently working on a Collaborating Doctoral Studentship with the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London to uncover how colonial histories of violence are embrocated in museum archives and how these destructive narratives continue to be present in museum displays and labels. This research seeks to find practical ways to decolonise archives and museums in collaboration with the museum. Much of Ivonne’s current interests are around imperial archives, the theory and practice of decolonialism from the global south, the geopolitics of knowledge, and museum practice in the west.

Áine McKenny is a cultural historian researching conflict, memory and exhibitions. 

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 the final year of a full-time PhD with the working title of:

A REVOLUTION IN CHILDREN’S CLOTHES?

CRAFTING CHANGE: CLOTHKITS AND A NEW VISION FOR CHILDREN’S CLOTHING, 1968 - 1988.

Having access to the private archives of the Clothkits founders for her research has enabled Nicola to conduct primary research that is entirely unique and original. Her research is based on archival research but also includes 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 completed a book on the history of Clothkits to be published in the near future. 

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.

During her research Nicola has curated a small Clothkits display in an unused shop window in Lewes, the home of Clothkits. Having made an animated film for adults and children on the subject of Clothkits and creativity, this was also shown as part of the display. She is a member of two academic network projects focusing on children's clothes and creativity and has given presentations on Clothkits to both. Nicola has  organised and curated a postgraduate exhibition in conjuction with the Centre for Design History at the University entitled Design Matters. This exhibition focused on what design means and how design affects the interaction of people with objects and imagery. She is currently teaching on level 4 and 6 undergraduate modules in Fashion and Dress History at the University of Brighton including Postmodernism and Retro Vintage Fashion as well as leading a workshop on the subject of Barbara Hulanicki and Biba.

Her interests include children's clothes from the 1960s to the present day, clothes as a creative educational tool, women designers, feminism, craft, folk art, home sewing and handmade clothes. She is eager to be involved with further exhibitions on subjects related to her research.

My project explores how decolonisation guidance from scholars, professional organisations and museum leaders affects the learning approach used by museums and the practice of learning staff, particularly those in public-facing roles. Drawing on literature from museum studies, psychology and decolonial theory, I will examine how this guidance is enacted through interactions between institutions, individual staff and audiences to build a comprehensive picture of the changes that occur. Using ethnographic case studies of UK-based museums who have publicly announced their commitment to decolonisation as part of their institutions’ work, this project aims to shed light on effective strategies for implementing decolonisation guidance that responds to specific concerns of various practitioners and public trust in decolonial work. 

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.  

Based in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, my research interest focuses on two case studies of subversive textile production from women incarcerated in the English asylum and workhouse systems of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The textile artefacts produced by both women are an important part of the history of asylum life, illustrating the societal expectations of women, how they were subjugated by these, and identifies the men who reinforced them. The experiences are evidenced by both the physical material production, records authored by medical professionals and, in one case, press reports.

Anika Shaikh is a PhD student at the University of Brighton. Her research interest covers design history and material culture in the 19th and 20th centuries in Britain with a special focus on transnational and postcolonial histories of crafts and designs.

Her PhD project is about the transnational and gendered history of British Modernism through the individual stories and works of Ethel Mairet (1872-1952). The research looks at the movement of objects, design, craft practice and philosophy by undertaking archival research, object-based analysis and oral history. 

Pragya Sharma is an AHRC Technē-funded Doctoral Researcher in the History of Design (2023-27) at the University of Brighton. She is working on unravelling stories of knitting from the Indian subcontinent while teasing out the finer concepts of domesticity, gender and labour within the craft practice. She was previously engaged as a design academic for over six years in India while pursuing various research projects that entailed fieldwork, working with artisans and ethnographic writing and documentation across the country.

My doctoral research critically unpacks the complexities of becoming free in, against and beyond the racial nation-state of india with a focus on the Shaheen Bagh protests, part of the wider nationwide anti-CAA movement (2019-20). 

I engage activist, media and academic discourses to interrogate the limits of recognition and legibility, suggesting instead the potentiality of Shaheen Bagh as a politics of hope grounded in prefiguration, refusal and abolition.

My research is funded by the AHRC Techne DTP.

I’m a disabled feminist academic, working in the subject areas of design justice, disability justice and mobilities. I consider myself to be a maker, designer, artist and disability rights activist. I'm currently in the first year of my PhD studentship at the University of Brighton. I am also an associate Lecturer at LCC university (UAL) in London, where I bring my expertise and knowledge of social and design justice to the curriculum. My previous professional experience includes working for large organisations like the NHS and Brighton and Hove city council in various roles relating to health and social care. Since becoming disabled, I have shifted my focus toward activism within the disabled community, especially in the arts scene in Brighton and Hove. I established and events organisation called VisAbility Arts between 2018 and 2021, our mission was to empower artists living with invisible disabilities by creating accessible spaces for them to sell and exhibit their work. Currently, I am a disabled panel member for Brighton and Hove's accessible city strategy, founder of the DiscReg (Disability Culture Research Group) and chair of the University of Brighton disabled and carer's staff network.

My PhD explores legacies of oppression that exist within traditional participatory design and research methodologies.My work aims to move beyond prevailing ideologies of inclusivity, particularly those formulated by individuals in positions of power. I instead argue that radical philosophical shifts in thinking are needed, where those who are conventionally designated as the recipients of inclusivity lead the discourse. My work aims to rethink design and research methodologies from an ontological perspective enabling new ways of mobilising marginalised communities. This focus on mobilities over participation enables designers and researchers to practice working within frameworks that actively dismantle these legacies of oppression.

My research examines the processes by which North American ethnographic objects were collected for museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am intestested in violence as a function in the construction of value in the art market, and how objects circulate in a settler colonial context. 

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 an AHRC-funded 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 co-founder of the Memory, Narrative, and Histories Collective, and is also a member of the Centre for Design History (CDH) and Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (CTSG) at the University of Brighton.

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.