Dr. Tanya Harrod
Title
Honorary Doctor
Person Type
Honorary
From starting her career as an art historian, Tanya Harrod soon moved in the direction of craft, design and technics, and is now one of the most highly regarded craft historians working today. Her debut book The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (1999) looked at an area which was then overlooked and, in some instances, actively disliked by the art world. It was awarded the Historians of British Art book award in 2000.
She has contributed regularly to The Burlington Magazine, The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, Apollo, Crafts, and the Literary Review. She co-founded The Journal of Modern Craft with Glenn Adamson and Edward S. Cooke. She was an Honorary Senior Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum and was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre in 2022. The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew, modern pots, colonialism and the counterculture (2012) won the James Tait Black Prize for biography. Her most recent books are The Real Thing: essays on making in the modern world (2015), Leonard Rosoman (2016), Craft (2018, part of the Whitechapel Gallery series Documents of Contemporary Art) and Humankind: Ruskin Spear, class, culture and art in 20th century Britain (2022). She is currently working on a double life of Rolf and Margaret Gardiner as a study in the 20th century political and artistic difference.