Moran Anna - Love objects : emotion, design and material culture

To our loved ones.

Victor Margolin

Louise Purbrick

Jo Turney

Catherine Harper

Elizabeth Howie

Noreen McGuire

Jessica Sewell

Jane Hattrick

Ann Wilson

Fran Carter

Christina Edwards

Adam Drazin

Jonathan Chapman

Cover: Pair of womens coral-red silk slip-on shoes, with ribbons and white kid lining, c. 1827. The right shoe bears the label of Melnotte, a French firm of shoemakers and sellers, which boasted warehouses in both Paris and London. Source: 1969.46.6P. The Shoe Collection, Northampton Museums and Art Gallery, Northampton Borough Council. Photograph by John Roan Photography.

Norman Hartnell seated in his drawing room at his country house Lovel Dene, Windsor, his swan vase on the table behind, 1953.

Fran Carter (School of Art and Design History, Kingston University)

Fran teaches Design Studies at Kingston University and University of the Creative Arts. She has just completed her PhD entitled Magic Toyshops: Narrative and Meaning in the Womens Sex Shop. Her research interests centre on the design of sexual retail spaces and notions of female empowerment achieved through the consumption of goods and spaces dedicated to the pursuit of female erotic pleasure. She is currently working on a study of the spatial design of female-orientated sex shop websites.

Professor Jonathan Chapman (School of Art, Design & Media, University of Brighton)

Jonathan is Professor of Sustainable Design, and Course Leader of the MA Sustainable Design, which he co-wrote and launched in 2009. Over the past decade, his teaching, consultancy and research have grown from their early polemical and activist roots, to developing strategic counterpoints to the unsustainable character of contemporary material culture. He has written two books: his monograph, Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences & Empathy (Earthscan, 2005) and his co-edited work, Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories: A Collection of Sustainable Design Essays (Earthscan, 2007). He has also contributed chapters to several peer-reviewed books (2008, 2009, 2010) and has published research papers in scholarly journals such as Design Issues (2008, 2009).

Dr Adam Drazin (Department of Anthropology, University College London)

Adam is the Coordinator of the MA in Culture.Materials.Design in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. He has published in a range of journals and books on such themes as care as culture in post-socialist urban Romania, photography and personhood and the interaction of anthropology with professional design.

Dr Christina Edwards (School of Education and Lifelong Learning, Aberystwyth University)

Christina completed a PhD in Fine Art Practice at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University. Working in early photographic processes over the last few years she has been researching the wet plate collodion process, and applying this in relation to the family archive. Her research interests are nineteenth-century photographic processes, vernacular photography and the snapshot, and the relationship between the family archive and how we remember.

Professor Catherine Harper (Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of Portsmouth)

Catherine is Dean of the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries at University of Portsmouth. She has specialized in large-scale public art, speculative exhibition work, and performance, and also writes on craft, textiles, the body, gender and subjective narratives. She is UK editor of Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, contributor to Selvedge magazine, and editorial board member of The International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. She published her first book, Intersex (Berg) in 2007, and her edited multi-volume Textiles: Primary and Critical Sources (Berg) was published in February 2012. She is writing a textile novel titled Hyena in Petticoats, and recently delivered a public lecture at The Shirt Factory Project as part of the City of Culture 2013 celebrations in Derry-Londonderry.

Dr Jane Hattrick (Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton)

Jane is a lecturer in the History of Art & Design at the University of Brighton specializing in fashion and dress history. Her doctoral research investigated the personal identity of the designer Norman Hartnell through a close examination of the material left in his personal collections and business archive. Jane assessed the impact of the private aspects of his life on the designers creative output through a close analysis of garments and representations of his couture clothing dating between 1921 and 1979.

Dr Elizabeth Howie (Department of Visual Arts, Coastal Carolina University)

Elizabeth received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. She is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. She specializes in the history and theory of photography.

Professor Victor Margolin (Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois, Chicago)

Victor Margolin is Professor Emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is a co-editor of the academic design journal, Design Issues, and is the author, editor or co-editor of a number of books including Design Discourse, Discovering Design, The Idea of Design, The Designed World and The Politics of the Artificial. Currently he is working on a three-volume World History of Design that will be published by Bloomsbury Academic.

Noreen McGuire (Asian Department, Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

Noreen has assisted with research at the Victoria and Albert Museum since 2011 in preparation for an upcoming shoe exhibition opening in 2015. During that time, she also worked on the Europe 16001800 project, which will see seven new galleries opening at the V&A dedicated to this time period. Noreen graduated with distinction from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, in 2010 with an MA in Design History and Material Culture, winning best thesis award that year for her thesis titled Inconspicuous Production: The Genteel Craft of Amateur Shoemaking in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.

Dr Anna Moran (Faculty of Visual Culture, National College of Art & Design, Dublin)

Anna is Director of the MA in Design History and Material Culture at the NCAD. Her research interests include the interaction between people and objects in the long eighteenth century and she has published several articles in the areas of glass studies, retailing history and material culture. She has served as an editorial board member of Artefact: Journal of the Irish Association of Art Historians and is currently on the board of editors of Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies.

Dr Sorcha OBrien (School of Art and Design History, Kingston University)

An industrial designer by training, Sorcha teaches design history and theory to Product and Furniture Design students at Kingston University, and her research interests focus on issues of identity and technology in design and material culture. She is the author of several articles on Irish national identity and technology, and is a sub-editor on the forthcoming Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design.

Dr Louise Purbrick (Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton)