Profile

Biography

After a career teaching English Literature, Linguistics and Theatre Studies I turned to architecture. I am now an architectural historian specialising in polite and vernacular architecture, and its relation to pictorial, literary, material and intellectual culture, during the long eighteenth century. I am interested to ask what can the history of architecture - located in its environment and often so powerfully associated with place - tell us about personal and social identity? What is the role of early modern architectural history and antiquarianism in the construction of genealogies of place? What are the processes and mechanisms through which architecture becomes invested with meaning and are those mechanisms culturally specific? How did places – and the architecture located in them - become an expression of identity and articulate values, whether personal, national or colonial?

I was awarded a Paul Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 2009 to extend my doctoral thesis ‘Architecture and Philanthropy: Building Hospitals in Eighteenth-Century York’ to a monograph, currently in preparation.

Research

Overview

• Architectural commissioning, funding, design, construction and representation;
• Public and domestic architectural production and reception in relation to social, political, ideological and cultural contexts;
• The relation between architecture and its environment;
• The country house and its landscape;
•  Urbanism;
• The relation between architecture, visual culture, place and identity, especially cartographic and architectural representation in the construction of imagined geography.
• The poetics of the cultural landscape;
• The role of the conceptualisation, construction and deployment of colonial architectural projects in representing emerging British national identity to varied audiences.

Current projects

I am currently completing a monograph 'Architecture, Philanthropy and Sanctifying the Classical in Eighteenth-Century York'. This microhistory of place relates architecture to one of England’s most important urban settings, revealing the roles played in both local and national politics by individual personalities. I locate architectural production and social activity in the specific cultural and intellectual landscape, drawing on the regional sensibility in certain circles that York and its hinterland was profoundly linked to its Roman and early Christian roots. The presence of practising architects steeped in architectural history, a concentration of antiquarian scholars, and considerable archaeological activity coalesced to invest the classicizing of eighteenth-century ‘Eboracum’ with a moral import. Philanthropic public architecture contributed to the construction of this new civic identity for York as a modern secular urban environment, where luxury consumption was tempered by prudent benevolence.

My research into early colonial architecture is focused on the British encounter in the western Mediterranean (1660-1720) and explores important relations between architecture and government institutions in the nascent British Empire before the evolution of Imperial logistical infrastructure. It is informed by Edward Said’s notion of ‘imagined geographies’ and meshes empirical research with the poetics of the cultural landscape to address two primary questions: What were the circumstances of architectural construction in the field in the earliest days of the empire? What was the relation between the conceptualisation, construction and deployment of architectural projects in representing the emerging British national identity to indigenous, military and domestic audiences?

Grants

Prizes, Awards and Grants:

2011 Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, Annabel Ricketts Bursary

2010 Paul Mellon Educational Programme Grant

2009 Paul Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

2007 Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain President’s Prize.

Publications

Selected publications

‘Nicholas Hawksmoor, ‘Obelisk Language’ and the Yorkshire Campagna’, The Georgian Group Journal, 19 (2011), pp. 1 -16.

‘The Hospital de la Isla del Rey, Minorca: Britain’s Island Hospital’, Architectural History, 53 (2010), pp. 123-61.

‘The York Retreat, “a vernacular of equality”’ in Built from Below: British architecture and the vernacular ed. by Peter Guillery (Routledge, 2010).

‘Wandesford Hospital, York: Colonel Moyser and the Yorkshire Burlington Group’, Architectural History, 51 (2008), pp. 111-35.

Forthcoming publications:

‘Founding, Funding and Form: Hospitals in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Architectural Theory and Practice’, vol. 2, Companion to Architecture in the Age of the Enlightenment’, ed. by Caroline van Eck and Sigrid de Jong (forthcoming, Oxford, 2013).

External activities

Memberships

Trustee of the York Georgian Society

Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain

Society of Architectural Historians

The Georgian Group

The Yorkshire Country House Partnership

Invited talks and conferences

‘”Mark ye the floore?”: grounding the classical in Beverley and York Minsters’, Public Lecture to York Georgian Society, (forthcoming January 2013).

‘”Erect new wonders and the old repair”: Burlington, Constantine and the loca sacra in early modern Yorkshire’. Renaissance Architecture and Theory Scholars’ Annual Meeting, University of York (May 2012).

‘Imagining Iberia, Dreaming of Home: a British Colonial Landscape’, Society of Architectural Historians Annual Meeting, Detroit, MI, USA (April 2012).

‘This tottering and wasted city’: re-edifying York in the early modern period’, How Yorkshire became polite: changes to the style and features of traditional buildings. Yorkshire Vernacular Buildings Study Group, Leeds Metropolitan University (March 2012).

‘Architecture, Philanthropy and Sanctifying the Classical in Eighteenth-Century York’, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (October 2011).

‘A Theatre of Empire: British Architectural Interventions in Menorca 1708-1802’, The Geography of Seventeenth-Century British Architecture: Historiography and New Horizons. SAHGB Annual Symposium, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London (May 2010).

‘Nicholas Hawksmoor, “Obelisk Language” and the Yorkshire Campagna’, Ripon Civic Society, Ripon (April 2010).

‘Architecture and Philanthropy: Building Hospitals in Eighteenth-Century York’, 5me Rencontre d’architecture europeènne: Bâtiments Publics II / Public Buildings II, Buildings for Education and Social Care/ Les écoles, les universities et les bâtiments des institutes sociales. Utrecht, the Netherlands (June 2008).

‘Quakers don’t do Architecture: The York Retreat, “a vernacular of equality” 1792-1820’, British Architecture and the Vernacular, Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain in partnership with the Vernacular Architecture Group, Annual Symposium, The Art Workers’ Guild, London, (May 2008). Also at the White Rose Partnership, University of Leeds (May 2008).

‘Wandesford Hospital: York, Colonel Moyser and the Yorkshire Burlington Group’, University of York Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Postgraduate Forum (November 2007).

Media coverage