Natasha Awais-Dean holds degrees from the University of Cambridge, the Royal College of Art and a doctorate from Queen Mary, University of London. She has curatorial experience from three national museums. Her research interests include the material culture of early modern Europe, with particular specialism in jewellery and metalwork. Natasha is a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and Features Editor of Jewellery History Today. Her book Bejewelled: Men and Jewellery in Tudor and Jacobean England has recently been published by British Museum Press.
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Astrid Castres received her Ph.D in History of Art from the École Pratique des Hautes Études/PSL in Paris (2016). Her thesis, under the supervision of Prof. Guy-Michel Leproux, focused on Embroiderers and Chasubliers in Paris during the Sixteenth Century, and was awarded the 2017 Prix Nicole from the Société d'histoire de l'art français. In March 2017, a Pasold/V&A Fellowship allowed her to undertake further investigation on this topic in the V&A collections. She is now a Post-doctoral fellow in the LabEx HaStec (Paris, École nationale des chartes). Her ongoing research focuses on technical innovations in Parisian textile industry in the 16th century. She has written several articles on French Renaissance textiles, such as « Les brodeurs de cour et la corporation parisienne au XVIe siècle », in the symposium proceedings for The Artist between Court and City,1300–1600 (2017), and « Le gaufrage des étoffes: un champ d'expérimentation textile à Paris au XVIe siècle », in Documents d'histoire parisienne (2017).
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Juliet Claxton was awarded her doctorate in 2012 from Queen Mary, University of London, under the supervision of Professor Evelyn Welch. She is the network facilitator for the Early Modern Dress & Textiles Research Network and is a member of the joint Wellcome Trust/King’s College research project ‘Renaissance Skin’. Her research interests include many aspects of early modern material culture, with a particular emphasis on the development of the English domestic market for luxury Asian goods, and the development of accompanying specialist retailers in seventeenth-century London. She has contributed articles to the Journal of the History of Collections, Jewellery History, and Fashioning the Early Modern (Evelyn Welch, ed. OUP 2017).
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Sarah Crowe is a student of Curatorial Studies at Goethe University and Staedel School in Frankfurt. Originally from Australia, she has interned with the Department of Fashion and Textiles at The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Through the conception of fashion and textile displays that critically and creatively explore, illuminate and develop ethnological relationships between people and culture, she is aspiring to translate sociocultural anthropological thinking into curatorial practice.
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Lena Dahrén graduated with a PhD in Textile History from the Art History Department, Uppsala University, in 2010. Her dissertation explored the technique, production use and reuse of bobbin made borders and edgings of gold and silver in the period 1550-1640. Previous to this she has worked as a handicraft consultant specialising in traditional Swedish bobbin lace with a special interest of the so-called free hand lace.
Her current research concerns the flow of luxurious textiles into Sweden in the mid 1500s and the contemporary dress reflected in extant church vestments.
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Moïra Dato After a Bachelor and Master of Research in History of Art at the University of Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, she completed her formation with a Master of Research in Dress and Textile History at the University of Glasgow, with a research focus on the Lyonnais merchants who supplied silks to the French Crown during the 18th-century. Presently a history PhD candidate at the European University Institute in Florence, her research is now extending to the market of Lyonnais silks in Italy at the same period.
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Mark De Vitis is a lecturer in the department of Art History at the University of Sydney. He is an interdisciplinary visual cultures scholar with a particular research and teaching interest in the history and theory of dress and clothing. Key areas of inquiry include the relationship between identity and representation, and the nexus between the material and visual expression of ideas. He has received research funding from major international research institutes – Cité internationale des Arts, Paris (2008) Power Institute Residency, Getty Research Grant, Los Angeles (2014–2015), Newberry Library Fellowship, Chicago (2016–2017) – and is the author of a number of works which focus on the sartorial culture of early modern European courts, including, ‘Sartorial Transgression as Socio-political Collaboration: Madame and the Hunt’. Konsthistorisk tidskrift, Volume 82, Issue 3, 2013 (205–218) and ‘The Queen of France and the Capital of Cultural Heritage’. In Early Modern Dynastic Marriages and Cultural Transfer. Edited by Joan Luis Palos. Surrey: Ashgate. 2016 (pp. 45–65). http://sydney.edu.au/arts/art_history/staff/profiles/mark.devitis.php
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Lindsay Dupertuis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. Her dissertation research focuses on the intersection of the decorative arts and literary culture in sixteenth-century Urbino. More broadly, she is concerned with issues of class, gender, and (dis)ability. Her M.A. thesis (UMD, 2015), “Imitation and Adaptation in Istoriato Maiolica: A Case-Study of the Anne de Montmorency Service, 1535,” discussed invention and workshop practices within a prominent Urbinate ceramics bottega. She has held graduate internships at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) and the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, Maryland).
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Jemma Field is a Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow affiliated with BrunelUniversity. Her research focuses on Anna of Denmark as a figure of cultural transfer and influence across the courts of Denmark, Scotland, and England. This year she has published articles on Anna’s wardrobe goods with Costume (March), and Anna’s 1617 hunting portrait by Paul van Somer with The British Art Journal (November). She is currently preparing a chapter on Anna's jewellery patronage and the politics of bodily display for an edited collection Fashioning Women at the Early Modern Court, 1400-1700, due out with Amsterdam University Press in early 2018. Jemma also runs a website focused on various aspects of early modern history: https://www.earlymoderncourts.com
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Lacy Gillette is a PhD student at Florida State University focusing on the history of printmaking and the early modern book under the direction of Dr. Stephanie Leitch. Her dissertation seeks to unpack the organization and collecting practices of costume via a study of book genres during the sixteenth century. Other research interests include women in early modern Europe, Reformation history, and the use of print in documenting and constructing travel narratives.
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Abigail Gomulkiewicz is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Ulinka Rublack. Her research explores Elizabethan aristocratic society through the clothing and accessories of William Cecil and his household. It combines extant objects, written materials, and historical reconstruction.
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Marc W. S. Jaffré is a sub-honours tutor at the University of St Andrews and an assistant editor for the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC). His research focuses on the history of early modern France. He is interested in the development of state institutions; warfare; print and political communication; and the evolutions of cultural concepts such as hospitality and entertainment. He has published articles on Henri IV's court and on communication and print during the Wars of Religion, and is currently co-editing a volume on early modern diplomacy and courts with Tracey Sowerby. He successfully defended his doctoral thesis in June 2017 at the University of St Andrews. His doctoral research focused on the historiographically neglected court of Louis XIII of France. His thesis examined the court from institutional, political and cultural perspectives and emphasized the role of courtiers in shaping its framework. The first three years of the thesis were funded through a 600th Anniversary Full Scholarship from the University of St Andrews, and a generous research grant from the Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles supported the fourth and final year. He is currently engaged in the process of turning this these into a monograph. He also holds an MPhil in Modern European History (2010), which he obtained with distinction, and a BA in History (2008), both from the University of Oxford (Merton College).
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Rebecca Morrison is a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) PhD candidate, with QMUL and the V&A. Her research examines the working life of the English mantua-maker during the long eighteenth century. It considers the mantua-maker’s business practices, relationships with clients, and other needlework trades. It also explores technical skills, using evidence from existent garments, and seeks to answer further intangible questions through the practice of reconstruction. After completing her MA in Museum Studies at UCL, Rebecca worked as an assistant curator and historical researcher for Kensington Palace. This was after a ten-year career as a theatre costume supervisor and maker, in both the UK and USA.
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Jane Partner is a Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where she carries out research on a range of literary and art-historical topics, often concerning the intersection between the two fields. Her first book is Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2018). Arising from her current research for Reading the Early Modern Body, Jane is also planning another project about gems and jewellery in early modern literature. Both these enquiries relate to her own practice as a sculptor with a particular interest in the body and wearable art.
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Isabella Rosner is completing an MPhil in History of Art and Architecture at the University of Cambridge. She is passionate about historic costume and textiles, and specialises in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British women’s needlework. Her dissertation explores pockets, chatelaines, and pouches in early modern England, and how they informed and presented ideas of women’s public and private selves.
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Catherine Howey Stearn is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender European History to 1800 at Eastern Kentucky Univesity. She received her MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art studying Dress History and her Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from Rutgers University. Her dissertation and published articles and essays examine the ways Elizabeth I and her privy chamber women used dress to build networks of support for the queen’s reign as well as create, perpetuate, extend, and challenge, Elizabeth’s monarchical authority and political image. She uses a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches and historical sources such as state papers, portraits, gift rolls, political libels, diaries and tomb monuments to explore this topic.
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Beth Walsh is a non-stipendiary Visiting Fellow, School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia where she completed her PhD with a thesis entitled ‘Gros point de Venise: lace and its representation in England, 1660-1702’. She continues to research the representation of lace in early modern England in written, sculptural, painted and printed form, aiming to place the ubiquitous yet largely non-verbal presence of lace at this time in a rigorous, academic framework by ascertaining how different aspects of its meaning were incorporated, balanced and understood. She works to re-establish the currency of a particular material at a particular time, thus developing an understanding not only of the lace itself but of the society in which lace carried such agency. In a parallel but complementary thread, Beth makes and exhibits contemporary lace, enriching her understanding of the practice of lacemaking.
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