‘England and Nowhere’: Women, Craft, and Environmental Utopianism 1880 – 1940
Supervised by Professor David Peters Corbett
Advised by Dr Lucy Bradnock
Funded by AHRC/CHASE
Alice is a doctoral student specialising in ecocriticism of Modern British Art and the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Her PhD research focuses on a number of women at the intersection of the Arts and Crafts Movement and English Modernism who engaged in ideas of environmental utopianism through craft. Her research project seeks to interrogate how women engaged with and contributed to questions of how the future could be imagined through craft’s visual and material relationship to the natural world. 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.
Alice is also the Editor in Chief of Immediations, the Courtauld’s journal of postgraduate research.
Research Interests
- British Modernism
- Arts and Crafts Movement
- Ecocriticism, ecology, and histories of environmentalism
- Intellectual History and the History of Ideas
- Word-Image relationships
- Print and Book histories
- Women Artists
- Textiles
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’
- MA History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art (2022 – 2023)
- BA History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art (2019 – 2022)
Conference Papers and Invited Talks
- “If I could but see it’: May Morris and the Visual Archive of Utopia in The Homestead and the Forest“, Collections and Research Day, Society of Antiquaries (November 2024)
- ‘Mapping the Earthly Paradise: Environmental Utopian Cartography in May Morris’ The Homestead and the Forest (1890)’, Victorian Aesthetics of the Outdoors, University of Chester (May 2024)
- “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)
Publications
- Review of Jim Endersby Arrival of the Fittest: Biology’s Imaginary Futures 1900-1935 (2025), British Society for Literature and Science (2025)
- ‘On Art as Environmental Knowledge’ Review of Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form (2024) and Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplède British Art and the Environment: Changes, Challenges, and Responses Since the Industrial Revolution (2023), Art History 48, no. 1, (2025)
- Review of Amy Elkins Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present (2022), Immediations 20, (2023).
Teaching
- Associate Lecturer BA2/BA3 The Modern Interior (2025-26)
- Teaching Assistant, BA1 Foundations, (2024-25)
- Teaching Assistant, Courtauld Summer University, Courtauld Institute of Art (2024 & 2025)
- Gallery Speaker, The Rural and the ‘Wild’: Nature in Gauguin’s Haystacks, Courtauld Summer School (2024)
