Ҵúmv

Global Cultures: Material, Textual and Visual

From artistic outputs of renowned genius to the social rituals of everyday life, culture shapes human experience. Clothing, literature, photography, and myriad other forms of cultural expression, from throughout history and across the globe, offer unprecedented opportunities to investigate histories of humanity. With strengths across Digital Humanities, English Literature and Language, Creative Writing, Textual Studies (including Shakespearian Studies), Material Culture, Visual Culture, Heritage and Tourism, this cluster works on scholarly projects across a dynamic breadth of the global cultural past and present.

Celebrating Ҵúmv’s heritage as an art school, the work of the cluster foregrounds the creativity, vibrancy, and resilience of this legacy. Scholars within the cluster have has significant engagement with cultural organizations such as Historic England, the National Trust and the Victorian & Albert Museum.

Dr Serena Dyer

The cluster lead for Global Cultures: Material, Textual and Visual is Dr Serena Dyer, an Associate Professor of History of Fashion and Material Culture. She is a broadcaster, author, and curator, specialising in histories of dress, manufacture, and consumerism. She is author of Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Labour of the Stitch: The Making and Remaking of Fashionable Georgian Dress (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Recent edited volumes include, with Sarah Bendall, Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) and, with Chloe Wigston Smith, Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers (Bloomsbury, 2020). She is the lead of the AHRC-funded Making Historical Dress project, and writes and presents the digital series, Fashion Through History, for English Heritage.

Dr Serena Dyer

Our members

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