Joanne Begiato appointed as Associate Dean for Research at LCF

London College of Fashion, UAL is delighted to announce that Professor Joanne Begiato has been appointed as Associate Dean for Research, and will be joining LCF in August 2024.

Joanne is a Professor of History, with broad interests spanning the histories of bodies, material culture, and emotions, and has published on their relationship with a range of phenomena including gender, sexualities, intimate relationships, family inheritances, loneliness, nostalgia, and sleeping arrangements.

Joanne has a PhD and BA in History from Durham University, and was appointed as a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and then as a College Teaching Officer at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, before joining Oxford Brookes University. In recent years she was Head of the School of History, Philosophy and Culture, and Associate Dean of Research and Knowledge Exchange of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes.

Author of three single-authored monographs, one co-authored monograph, and four co-edited volumes, as well as over thirty-five journal articles and book chapters, Joanne has shaped and contributed to a number of historical and cultural debates from marriage to manliness, the home and its objects, to people’s encounters with institutions such as the law, the Church, and the armed forces. Her methodology is inter-material, fusing the histories of emotions, bodies, senses, and objects to bridge the representational and experiential.

She has been awarded external funding for her projects, including a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship (2008-10) for her work on the emotional and material lives of Georgian parents and an AHRC Research Network Grant (2019-21) for a project that drew together a number of stakeholders to investigate ‘Inheriting the Family: Emotions, History, and Heritage’. Her current research is with Dr Michael Brown, Lancaster University, leading a research team exploring the Victorian Hand and its meaning in the past and present.

Joanne is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, member of the Project Board of the Bibliography of British and Irish History, and one of the editors of Global Studies in Social and Cultural Maritime History with Palgrave Macmillan.

I am tremendously excited to be joining London College of Fashion, which is a dream institution for me. I have been fascinated by historical dress, fashion design, and costume design for film and television ever since I can remember. Indeed, my aspiration as a child was either to be a curator of dress at the V&A or design costumes for films. Although life intervened and I followed a different pathway into history, I have spent the last decade heading back towards my lifelong passions, increasingly working on the histories of bodies, textiles, and crafting. I cannot wait to help facilitate the amazing work of LCF researchers and be part of the coolest cultural powerhouse that is LCF.

What has been your career highlight so far?

My career highlights are often around sharing my research with the public. I was delighted when my work on masculinities was used in 2023 as part of the research and design process for a play written by Sean Burn and directed by Yasmin Sidhwa of Mandala Theatre Company, Oxford, called MAD[E], informed by boys and young men from groups in Oxford, London, Luton, Coventry, Sunderland, and Southampton. Both epic and personal, the play tackled young men’s mental health, emotions, and wellbeing and was at once tragic, funny, and uplifting. I was powerfully moved to see my research used to inform something so important. With Dr Michael Brown, I also ran workshops in 2023 with surgeons and sewers, which used the history of hands to explore how haptic practice informs current understandings of embodied selfhood. I think my career highlight is probably that I can continue working on Victorian hands, and I’ll be announcing some good news about funding for that soon!

Felicity Colman, Dean of Research and Knowledge Exchange says: "We are delighted to welcome Joanne Begiato to LCF as our new Associate Dean of Research. Throughout her career, Joanne has shown enormous commitment to the field of material cultures, the support of researcher communities, and the doctoral student experience. I look forward to working closely with Joanne during this innovative period for LCF at the new East campus."