The Art History and Architecture Collection is a vital resource for academic libraries, offering extensive insights into various themes such as art movements, single-artist studies, decolonising art, gender and masculinity, citizenship, architecture and design. This collection aims to broaden the scope of art history, addressing a diverse range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.
The collection encompasses theories and histories of materiality, exploring the intricate relationship between making and thinking, fashion and culture, production and consumption, textiles and industry.
| Key series |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Design and Material Culture |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 17 |
| 2023/4 titles | 28 |
| 2013-2022 titles | 74 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Singleartist studies |
| Subcultures |
| Design |
| Architecture |
| Citizenship |
| Surrealism |
| Art movements |
| Decolonising art |
| Queer art |
| Gender – masculinity |
| Modernism |
| Postmodernism |
| Thema subject categories |
| Architecture |
| Avant-garde |
| Ceramics, mosaics and glass: artworks |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History of art |
| Material culture |
| Performance art |
| Theory of art |
SDG coverage
Art history and architecture collection
Natalie Ferris’s article on the Portuguese concrete poet Ana Hatherly identifies the transformative potential of gesture through experiments with the hand: in drawing, asemic writing, visual poetry, and embodied and nonverbal ‘new languages’. Ferris considers how Hatherly’s work short-circuits the linguistic system’s supposed requirements for meaning and legibility.
Central Station became a relic of the Victorian city following its closure in 1968. Chapter 4 looks at the ten-year period after 1968 and the large-scale, but unrealised, developments proposed by Building Design Partnership and Cruickshank & Seward. Here was manifest the relations between global capital investment, decolonisation and renewal. In an almost unbelievable tale, the plans for Central Station casts light on the murky property dealings brought about by the restructure of the railways in tandem with shifting international cultures, finance and procurement. The Crown Agents financial scandal had a direct impact on the formal proposals for the city.
The introduction makes the case for a spatial account of cities and the importance of understanding the formal development of cities. It distinguishes between ‘recovery’ and ‘renewal’ in post-war Britain – two distinct phases of urban development. The schema of policy–plan–production as a critical methodology by which to analyse the relationships between government decision making and on-the-ground outcomes is presented. The temporal and geographical framing of the book is explained within the context of a set of global meta-narratives that also had their impact on society and construction. The case for a place-centred account and what this can bring to the study of cities is argued. Finally, the idea of the various scales and networks at play in the production of space is introduced.
In the Introduction, the book’s co-editors travel through some of the contemporary and historical contexts – socio-political, intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic – which have shaped the book’s critical framework and propositions. The Introduction introduces the book’s structure and methodology and gives a brief overview of all the contributions.
This chapter sets the stage for exploring how fashion developed among ordinary Europeans in the early modern period and transformed the ‘look’ and experience of fashion – both visually and materially – at popular levels of society. Through an interdisciplinary investigation, it explores what were the key elements of fashion at the lower social levels in early modern Europe and introduces innovative experimental and material-based methodologies to improve our understanding of early modern dress and material culture. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it aims to demonstrate that, by combining archival, material and pictorial evidence with hands-on experiments and historical reconstruction, we can shed new light on on popular taste, dissemination and the material and cultural meanings of popular dress. Second, by considering early modern fashion in a socially more inclusive manner, from both material and cultural perspectives, it illustrates how dress fashion became a significant cultural driver across various social classes in Europe, spanning from prominent fashion centres to peripheral towns.
Hannah Van Hove’s hybrid essay on the papers of mid- to late-twentieth-century experimental women writers is refracted through her own archival research conducted. It grapples with twin ideas – language as gesture and language as occupying space – to consider the points at which they can be said to touch, even to listen to, one another. Van Hove uses the archive to challenge, and yet also to sustain, such a sense of ambivalence concerning the possibility for meaning, questioning what it means to write ‘experimentally’.
Naomi Pearce’s article is an entangled body-text that reflects upon encounters within the archives of two older women artists based in Britain, and six months spent visiting a teaching mortuary in Scotland observing full cadaveric dissections. Dissection is figured as a gesture-in-conflict, wherein the intimacy and generosity of the surgical cut is countered by voyeurism and the biomedical gaze. Pearce asks how such tensions can help feminist researchers re-enter the archive.
To mutter is to grasp, as Nia Davies’s poetic essay on Mamaiaith (‘Mother Tongue’ in Welsh), explores. Davies reflects on what separates her from her grandmother’s book on linguistics, written in Cymraeg, with reference to Édouard Glissant’s work on colonial monolingualism. Via the performative possibilities of poetry and ritual, Davies performs the matrilineal sounds of one’s own displaced language.
By drawing on Keston Sutherland’s corrective re-reading of the irreducibility of style in Capital, Joanna Walsh interrogates the flourishing of ASMR goop-girls, as a satire of existence under capitalism – with their temporal materialities of slime becoming a critique of the commodity. She compares this phenomenon to the repetitive gestures that illuminates Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feminist art film, Jeanne Dielman, to think about the two visual mediums in tandem.
In a playful and poetic essay, Daniela Cascella develops a “chimeric” critical writing that is generatively haunted by the voices of untranslated literature and concealments.