‘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 examines how English craftswomen between 1880 and 1940 drew on the natural world – in material and representation alike – as a source of utopian thought. Reconstructing an environmental tradition of utopianism, it traces a line from May Morris’ vegetal embroideries through the rural craft experiments of Dartington and Ditchling to the contested place of handicraft in modernist literature. In doing so, it reframes both the intellectual history of English craft and geographies of women’s utopianism as non-metropolitan, arguing that the future, for this generation, was represented not by the planned cities of utopian literature, but by the hedgerow, the garden, the field – places where the living, changing processes of nature challenged rational, manmade design and strained craft to the limits of what it could represent, including utopia itself.
From 2024 to 2026, Alice was also 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’ - BA History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art (2019 – 2022)
Conference Papers and Invited Talks
- ‘Handwork and Handwork: Handweaving and Environmental Nationalism in Ditchling’ Association for Art History Annual Conference, University of Cambridge (April 2026)
- ‘A Living Garment: Elizabeth Peacock and Britain’s Lost Modernism’ Views of their Own: Rediscovering and Re-Presenting the Work of Women Artists, Manton Centre for British Art, Courtauld Institute of Art (March 2026)
- “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
- ‘Publishing, Pastorals and Petticoats’ Review of Kristin Bluemel Enchanted Wood: Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain (2025), Visual Culture in Britain (2026).
- 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)
