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Job title: Research Professor in History

Email Address: J.A.Styles@herts.ac.uk

Memberships and Appointments:

Honorary Fellow, Royal College of Art
Honorary Research Fellow, Victoria and Albert Museum

Website: www.johnstyles.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

I was born and educated in Bradford, Yorkshire, where my enthusiasm for history was fired by a love of the Pennine landscape and a group of inspirational teachers at Bradford Grammar School. After studying history as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, I did postgraduate work at the Universities of York, London and Cambridge. I went on to lecture in history at Bradford, Bath and Bristol Universities, before becoming Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There I was responsible for the M.A. Course in the History of Design run jointly by the Royal College of Art and the Museum. I have been Research Professor in History at the University of Hertfordshire since 2004.

At the Victoria and Albert Museum, I was historical advisor to the Museum's new British Galleries, 1500-1900, which opened in 2001. I developed the themes for the British Galleries and advised curators as they created a sequence of displays embodying those themes. With Michael Snodin, I co-authored Design and the Decorative Arts: Britain 1500 to 1900 (V&A Publications, 2001), the book published to complement and contextualize the British Galleries.

I have held a Pasold Research Fund Research Readership in the History of Fashion and Clothing, the Fletcher Jones Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at the Huntington Library in California, and a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. From 2001 to 2004, I was Associate Director of the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, which linked the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal College of Art, and Royal Holloway, University of London.

I have published on design, consumption, material culture, manufacturing, crime and the criminal law, principally in eighteenth-century Britain. My early work was on the history of crime, policing and legislation. It led me to develop an interest in using the records of the criminal courts to research a range of issues beyond the criminal. This approach is at the heart of my recent book - The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (Yale UP, 2007) - a study of clothing practices among the common people.

I am currently working on two projects. The first - Spinning in the Era of the Spinning Wheel - is a study of hand spinning in England from the late Middle Ages to the start of the nineteenth century. The second - Material London, 1660-1850 - explores the material lives of rich and poor in eighteenth-century London, with a special emphasis on the way ordinary things were implicated in everyday life.

I am keen to supervise MPhil and PhD students who wish to research the cultural, social, or economic history of Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, in particular consumption, design, the domestic interior, textiles, fashion, product innovation and the organization of manufacturing.

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