In her role as co-leader of University of Brighton’s Centre for Design History’s Graphic Design Histories strand, Harriet Atkinson has co-curated a series of four ‘In Conversation’ events, to be held online in autumn 2020. These events will showcase four recent publications by fellow Centre for Design History members: on Thursday 12 November 2020 Tim Satterthwaite, author of Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal will be in conversation with Kim Sichel (Boston) and Jeremy Aynsley (Brighton), chaired by Harriet. On Thursday 19 November 2020 Damon Taylor, author of Moving Objects: A Cultural History of Emotive Design will be in conversation with Deborah Sugg Ryan (Portsmouth), chaired by Annebella Pollen (Brighton). On Wednesday 25 November 2020 Zeina Maasri author of Cosmopolitan Radicalism: Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties will be in conversation with Hala Auji (American University of Beirut) and Louise Purbrick (Brighton), chaired by Jeremy Aynsley (Brighton). Lastly, on Wednesday 9 December 2020 Ceren Ozpinar and Mary Kelly (University College Cork) will be in conversation about their co-edited book Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today, chaired by Megha Rajguru (Brighton).

Harriet is also co-convening the Exhibitions Histories Reading Group during this academic year alongside Brighton PhD students Kate Guy and Andrea Potts. Over five meetings we will discuss approaches to using interviews with exhibition makers; how to interrogate exhibitions whose context and/or content is fraught; how far exhibitions allow us to understand a historical moment; and how far exhibitions can shape, mediate or control the experience of spectators past and present.

Harriet will speak at the conference ‘Media Building: Architecture, Communications and the Built Environment from Fleet Street to Facebook’, to be held in Salford from 8-9 July 2020. Harriet will join Dr Elizabeth Darling (Oxford Brookes) and Dr Jessica Kelly (UCA) as part of a round table entitled “Media Spaces and Architectural Modernism in England” in which each speaker will take a media space – which we understand as encompassing buildings and media such as periodicals and exhibitions – and show how the intimate intersection of ideas, people, words and materials produced and reproduced the “modern” in architecture.

Harriet’s short paper is entitled “Architectural Review and the MARS Group Exhibition 1938″. It will address the way in which the 1938 Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group Exhibition of the Elements of Modern Architecture acted as a manifesto for promoting the so-called ‘new architecture’. The exhibition, mounted at London’s New Burlington Galleries, used built and landscape elements, photographs, photomontages, illustrations and textual banners. To mark its opening and to amplify its messages, Architectural Review published an eight-page ‘Pictorial Record’ by Le Corbusier. This paper will consider the way the MARS exhibition experimented with forms of communication and mediation. Contemporary designers regarded it as a key British documentary exhibition-as communication and emulated it in their development of World War Two propaganda exhibitions.

Harriet is looking forward to giving a paper at the Social History Society conference, to be held from 29th June to 1st July 2020 at Lancaster University. The Society’s conference is the largest gathering of social and cultural historians in the UK.

The conference programme will be organised into eight thematic strands, ranging across time and space, from the (pre)medieval to the present. Harriet will give her paper entitled “Exhibitions as political ‘demonstrations’? The Artists International Association and expressions of solidarity during World War Two in Britain” on Monday 29th June at 3.30pm in the strand on ‘Welfare, Humanitarianism and Social Action’ within a session entitled ‘Community and Campaigning in the City’.

Harriet is delighted to be speaking at the 12th International Committee for Design History and Design Studies conference, held in October 2020 in Zagreb. The conference theme is “Lessons to Learn? Past Design Experiences and Contemporary Design Practices” and the conference venue will be HUB385, one of the biggest coworking spaces in Croatia.

Harriet’s paper is entitled “Exhibitions as political ‘demonstrations’? Artists International Association’s For Liberty exhibition, London 1943″. It will be published in the conference proceedings.