Dr Imogen Hart

PhD (York), MA (York), BA (Hons) (UCL)

Teaching Fellow in History of Art

School of Education, Humanities and Languages

Imogen Hart

Role

Dr Imogen Hart specialises in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British art, with a particular focus on the Arts and Crafts movement. She has held teaching positions at universities in both the UK and the USA, most recently within the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. After completing her PhD at the University of York, Dr Hart served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate and later as an Assistant Curator at the Yale Center for British Art. Her research and teaching interests encompass craft, design, interiors, sculpture, curating, exhibition history, the relationship between art and science, critical approaches to art history, and the histories of British art.

Teaching and supervision

Courses

Modules taught

  • Making and Meaning in Western Art
  • Advanced Seminar in Art History: Victorian Art and Design (Module Leader)
  • History of Art Synoptic
  • Curatorial Practice
  • Field Work in History of Art
  • Reading Art History (Module Leader)
  • Art and the Environment
  • Museums and Art History

Research

Dr Imogen Hart has published extensively on the history of the Arts and Crafts movement, including the book Arts and Crafts Objects (Manchester University Press, 2010), and a collection of essays co-edited with Jason Edwards, Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867-1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts (Ashgate, 2010). Most recently, she published an article on the legacies of the Arts and Crafts interior in the Journal of Interior Design (December 2023). Her work on twentieth-century craft has appeared in Winterthur Portfolio and the Journal of Modern Craft.

Dr Hart’s research on the history of sculpture includes a volume co-edited with Claire Jones, Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe, Seventeenth Century to Contemporary (Bloomsbury, 2020), which brings to the forefront makers, objects, and spaces that have been marginalized by the enforcement of boundaries between fine and decorative art. A special issue of Art History, titled ‘British Art and the Global’, which she co-edited with Dorothy Price, examines the implications of challenging the institutional division of the discipline into fields defined by national borders.

Her research has been supported by various prestigious organisations, including the AHRC, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Association for Art History, and the Henry Moore Foundation, among others.

Professional information

Memberships of professional bodies

  • Association for Art History
  • Design History Society
  • Historic Interiors Affiliated Group of the Society of Architectural Historians

Conferences

  • Design History Society Conference, Canterbury, September 2024
  • Queer(ing) Space(s), Society of Antiquaries of London, October 2024

Further details

Dr Imogen Hart is one of the Editors of the Journal of Modern Craft. She serves on the Board of Directors of the William Morris Society in the United States and is a member of the Events and Conferences Committee of the Historic Interiors Affiliate Group of the Society of Architectural Historians.