Contributors

Lina Hakim is a London-based researcher, lecturer and artist, who is particularly interested in the overlaps between the material cultures of science, technology, craft and play. She is currently Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the V&A and teaches a course on ‘Science, Art & Design’ to undergraduate STEM students at Imperial College London. Her PhD project, ‘Scientific Playthings: Artefacts, Affordance, History’, looked at three 19th-century scientific instruments that became toys to explore the thinking that things afford at the levels of encounter, production, use and re-appropriation.

Melissa Hamnett has been Curator of Sculpture at the V&A since 2007. She has spoken and published on 19th- and 20th-century sculpture, specialising particularly in the links between British and French output. More recently, she has focused on the production, consumption and display of works by the New Sculpture. She is Governor of the Decorative Arts Society, 1850-Present, and advises on public sculpture projects in the UK and abroad.

Nick Humphrey has been a curator in the Furniture Department at the V&A since 1994, where he is responsible for European furniture up to 1700. He has published on various aspects of woodwork following his involvement in the British Galleries (2001), the Medieval and Renaissance galleries (2009), and the Dr Susan Weber Furniture Gallery (2012). He is currently a council member of the Regional Furniture Society, a role he has also fulfilled for the Furniture History Society.

Roisin Inglesby is Curator of Architectural Drawings at Historic Royal Palaces. Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Designs at the V&A. Roisin has a BA in History from the University of Oxford and an MA in The History of Design and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, New York. She is currently working on a display at the V&A about the Arts and Crafts architect Philip Webb, due to open in November 2015.

Liam O’Connor is a London-based artist. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2006, and has exhibited in group and solo shows throughout the UK. He has been artist in residence at The British Museum since early 2010, and between April 2014 and March 2015 was artist in residence at the V&A, making work in response to the Museum’s Exhibition Road Building Project. Focusing mainly on drawing, the work explores the rituals and patterns of the two very different cultures of museums and construction.

Danielle Thom is Assistant Curator of Prints at the V&A. Her PhD thesis looked at the role of satirical print culture in developing the 18th-century English public sphere. She is interested in the intersections between 18th-century sculpture and print culture, and is currently writing a book on the sculptor Joseph Nollekens.

Swati Venkatraman Iyer trained as a textile designer, before completing the V&A/RCA MA in History of Design in 2014, where her research concerned the technological, social and historical dimensions of weaving. Her MA dissertation explored how textile technologies were adopted, adapted and strategically deployed as active agents of social, economic and political change in Gandhi’s Khadi movement from 1917 to 1935.