Alice Dodds

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 engage 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.