Craft and Women’s Environmental Utopianism in Britain 1880 – 1940
Supervised by Professor David Peters Corbett
Advised by Dr Lucy Bradnock
Funded by AHRC/CHASE
My research focusses on a number of women in the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain who engaged in ideas of environmentalism and utopianism through craft. Studying embroidery, gardening and book making, amongst other craft forms, this project seeks to interrogate how women such as May Morris, Mary Newill, Olive Cockerell, Janet Ashbee and Gertrude Jekyll engages in ways of expressing environmental utopian ideas, forming utopian communities, and creating idealised environmental spaces though craft. This research highlights how scholarship on both women’s work in the Arts and Crafts movement, and studies of British women’s utopianism, have often occluded natural, environmental and non-metropolitan subjects, and seeks, therefore, to shed light on women’s engagements with utopian ideas beyond the space of the city.
Education
- PhD in History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art (2023 – )
- MA History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art (2022 – 2023)
‘New York-London-Paris 1880 – 1940′ Supervised by Professor David Peters Corbett
Dissertation: “Unfettered by the Earth’s Seasons:” Women and Anti-Modern Time in the Book Works of Clare Leighton’ - BA History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art (2019 – 2022)
Conferences and Invited Talks
- “Some of the Conversation I know too well”: Vanessa Bell’s Dialogues with Virginia Woolf in the Floral and Foliate Imagery of Kew Gardens (1919 and 1927)’, Virginia Woolf and Ecology, 32nd Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference, (June 2023)
- “We are two women”: Queer Ecology and Lesbian Land Erotics in the Arts and Crafts Movement’, De Morgan Foundation, (June 2023)
Research Interests
- British Modernism
- Arts and Crafts Movement
- Ecocriticism, ecology, and histories of environmentalism
- Word-Image relationships
- Women artists
- Print and Book histories
- Textiles
