Members

Objects Unwrapped project lead and blog co-editor:

Annebella Pollen is Principal Lecturer and Academic Programme Leader in the History of Art and Design at University of Brighton. Her research examines art, craft, design, dress and photography across a range of periods and case studies. Her publications include Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life, The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians, Photography Reframed (co-edited with Ben Burbridge) and Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice (co-edited with Charlotte Nicklas).

Objects Unwrapped blog co-editor:

Charlotte Nicklas is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at University of Brighton, and co-editor, with Annebella Pollen, of Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice. She is interested in all aspects of the history of fashion, dress and textiles particularly in their influence on and reflection of cultural concerns. Her research has centred on textual, literary and journalistic representations of fashion in nineteenth-century Britain and America.

Object Unwrapped members:

Janet Aspley is an AHRC-funded PhD student at University of Brighton. Her doctoral thesis, Hillbilly Deluxe: Male Performance Dress and Authenticity in Country Music 1947-Present, looks at a style of dress traditional in country music, tracing its association with authenticity and asking what this can show us about changing constructs of masculinity, class and race in country music. She has recently completed an AHRC-funded placement at Worthing Museum.
Jade Bailey-Dowling is a graduate of MA History of Design and Material Culture at University of Brighton. Her research interests include fashion curation, fashion and horror, and digital practices in the museum. Her MA thesis explored fashion history in outreach, with a particular focus on Worthing Museum’s Costume Trail.
Susan Bishop was Senior Lecturer at University of Brighton teaching Fashion Marketing until her retirement in 2019. She has an MA in History of Design and Material Culture (University of Brighton) and an MA in Fashion Curation (London College of Fashion). Her research interests include interwar fashion and historic department stores and their fashion shows. Her current research explores how insects, flora and fauna have inspired fashion design through history.
Kate Debono completed her MA in Museum and Galleries: Histories of Textiles and Dress in 2007 at the Textile Conservation Centre, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. She has been volunteering with Worthing Museum’s Learning Team since 2017. Her research interests include twentieth-century everyday dress, high street clothing, collecting and collections; this forms the basis of her AHRC-funded PhD at University of Brighton, starting 2019.
Wendy Fraser is an MA student in History of Design and Material Culture at University of Brighton. She volunteers weekly at Brighton Museum with the Curator of Fashion and Textiles helping with the collection and exhibitions. Her research interests include kitsch art and objects, twentieth century furniture and interiors, everyday fashion and business history.
Angelica Groom is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at University of Brighton. She is the author of Exotic Animals in the Art and Culture of the Medici Court in Florence (Brill, 2018). Her research examines the roles animals played in the political imaging and cultural self-fashioning of the early modern court, through their use as subjects in art and their deployment as beasts in ritual life.
Caroline Hamilton is an AHRC-funded PhD student at University of Brighton / Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove. Her doctorate examines the design and impact of the dance company Les Ballets 1933. Caroline’s research interests are in early twentieth-century dance and the development of costume design and construction. Most recently Caroline was a Fellow at Jacob’s Pillow (Massachusetts, USA) where she catalogued the historic costume collection and co-curated the exhibition Dance We Must: Treasures from Jacob’s Pillow, 1906-1940.
Jane Holt is Librarian of Pallant House Gallery’s art book and archive collections, and a volunteer at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery. Previously Jane managed the London College of Fashion’s archive of fashion and fashion education at University of the Arts London, using the collection to teach students object-based and archive research methods. Jane is interested in early-mid twentieth century British Modernist art, design, fashion and literature.
Veronica Isaac is a freelance lecturer and museum curator, and a part-time lecturer in History of Art and Design at University of Brighton, where she completed her PhD. She has worked with regional and national museum collections, and also with a number of private collectors. Her research interests range widely, but she has developed a particular specialism in the history of dress and theatre costume of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Johanna Lance is a dressmaker, milliner and long-term volunteer in the Worthing Museum costume department. Johanna has published on silhouettes and male dandies, and has research interests in historical fancy dress, particularly in the eighteenth century. In 2019 she will be taking up a three-year AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award between University of Brighton and Worthing Museum.
Nicola Miles is an MA student in Textiles at University of Brighton. She is also a freelance textile designer specialising in childrenswear. Her research includes folk traditions, handmade clothes including Clothkits, and women’s narratives and storytelling in textiles.
Bridget Millmore is a researcher interested in the biography of objects. Her research ranges from eighteenth century love tokens, silhouettes and thread buttons to twentieth century lace manufacture and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows in Britain. She completed her doctorate at University of Brighton in 2015, where she is a visiting lecturer; she is also a long term volunteer in the coins and medals department of the British Museum, specialising in ‘altered’ coins from the eighteenth century.
Cheryl Roberts is Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at University of Brighton, and Tutor in Critical and Historical Studies for Fashion and Textiles at the Royal College of Art. Her PhD, completed 2018, was entitled Consuming Mass Fashion in Britain, 1929-1939: The Impact of the Purchasing Power of Young Working Class Women on the Development of Mass Ready-to-Wear Manufacture.
Jenny Roberts completed her AHRC-funded PhD at University of Brighton in 2019. Her thesis, Female Munition Workers’ Dress in Britain, 1914-1918, examined the postcards, photographs and cartoons in which female munition workers were depicted and how such images articulated attitudes to class and gender in war work of the period.
Suzanne Rowland is an AHRC-funded PhD student at University of Brighton, where she lectures in Critical Studies for Fashion and Textiles. She originally trained in fashion design and has many years of experience working as a costume maker for film and theatre. Her research interests include dress history, material culture, garment production, sportswear and film costume.
Hannah Rumball is a part-time lecturer in Critical Studies for Fashion and Textiles at University of Brighton. She completed her PhD at Brighton in 2016 with a thesis entitled The Relinquishment of Plain dress: British Quaker women’s abandonment of Plain Quaker attire, 1860-1914.
Emmy Sale is an MA student in History of Design and Material Culture at University of Brighton and the recipient of an Association of Dress Historians student fellowship. Her BA Fashion and Dress History dissertation won the Design History Society student essay prize in 2018. Her research interests lie in the interwar period including homemade clothing, women’s periodicals and beachwear.
Karen Scanlon completed an MA in History of Design and Material Culture at University of Brighton in 2018. Karen currently works as a volunteer at Worthing Museum, where she was initially recruited to help with the Costume Trail outreach project launched in October 2016. Her postgraduate research focused on oral history, everyday fashion and shopping in Brighton from 1950s-1970s.
Lou Taylor is Professor Emerita in Fashion and Dress History at University of Brighton and an international authority on the subject. Her major works include The Study of Dress History (2002) and Establishing Dress History (2005). Her latest book, Paris Fashion and World War Two: Global Diffusion and Nazi Controls, co-edited with Marie McLoughlin, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic. Lou has been using the dress collections at Worthing Museum for teaching and research since the 1960s.
Anna Vaughan Kett is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at University of Brighton. She completed a PhD in Design History in 2012. Her current research interests are Quaker women’s textiles and dress, the British Free Produce Movement, and female activism against slave-grown cotton goods during the mid-nineteenth century.