金曜日 13 11月, 2026 - 土曜日 14 11月, 2026
Dana Arnold, Professor of Art and Cultural Heritage at the Sainsbury Institute, will present a paper at this symposium.
Dana’s paper, Un-writing and Re-writing London: Women architectural historians of the mid-twentieth century, will take place on Saturday 14 November 11.10-11.30 as part of the Historians panel.
This third symposium in memory of Mark Girouard looks at women’s contributions to architectural history in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Organised by Dr Kyle Leyden, Lecturer in Early Modern Architecture and Visual Culture, the Courtauld; Dr Manolo Guerci, Reader in Architecture, University of Kent and Prof. Elizabeth McKellar, President, SAHGB. Supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and The Institute of Historic Building Conservation.
About the Event
There have been a growing number of studies of female architects over the past twenty years but almost no accounts of female architectural historians. One exception is Dana Arnold’s edited collection Women and Architectural History: The Monstrous Regiment Then and Now (2025) which involved women operating from the 1970s onwards. This symposium looks back further to earlier generations involved in the writing and promotion of architectural history in a wide range of spheres from the early twentieth century onwards. Papers will cover women working as academics, curators, journalists, photographers and in heritage and conservation. They will consider the opportunities and restrictions that women encountered, the impact they made, and the ways in which women’s participation in the subject area shifted over time.
Full programme and further information can be found on the Courtauld Institute of Art’s website.
About the Talk
Un-writing and Re-writing London: Women architectural historians of the mid-twentieth century
Saturday 14 November 11.10-11.30
Professor Dana Arnold
The architectural history of London in the long eighteenth century has been defined by canonical studies privileging the male author genius, which appeared in the 1940s and 1950s. The biographical emphasis of these narratives endorses the notion of a city made by men either as architects or patrons, and for men as consumers of a new metropolitan environment. Notably, moreover, many of these studies were written by men, including Sir John Summerson and Sir Howard Colvin both of whom enjoys his own place in the pantheon of British Architectural History.
Recently I have been thinking about the contribution made by women historians who were also working in the middle years of the twentieth century to our understanding of the urban development of eighteenth and early nineteenth century London. The legacy of, for example, Hermione Hobhouse, Ann Saunders, Alison Kelly and the social historian M. Dorothy George reveals alternative narratives about London that move us away not only from the canonical histories of great men patrons and architects but also the unquestioned authority and assumptions of the authorial voice.
My starting point is that an awareness of the implications of the master narratives of the discipline is essential and enables us to expand the discourses around London in the long eighteenth century. Taking the feminist recognition of the more collective and holistic approach that women can adopt in a range of contexts as my frame, I explore how women operated as historians, archivists and editors during this crucial period in the evolution of the architectural history of London. I focus equally on their contribution to the archive as well as the ways in which they brought this material into the public domain. I argue that a more collective and holistic approach to how the intricacies of the evidence intertwine with the processes of research and writing reveals a range of actors in the production of the architecture and the architectural history of London. In this way, we see how the vital contribution of these women dissembles established historical orthodoxies to reveal the city’s architectural, social and cultural complexity. Moving forward, we can adopt these narrative strategies in the re-writing of London as a city made for and consumed by a diverse range of publics.
Professor Dana Arnold FSA is Professor of Art and Cultural Heritage at the Sainsbury Institute, University of East Anglia. She is an internationally renowned authority in the field of Architectural History and Theory whose work has been published in over 25 languages. Her research focuses on feminist and decolonising alternatives to canonical architectural histories and includes Women and Architectural History: The Monstrous Regiment Then and Now (2024) awarded a Judges’ Commendation Colvin Prize SAHGB 2025, Architecture and Ekphrasis (2020), and The Spaces of the Hospital (2014). She is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Advisory Board; Chair of the Programme Board of Research Infrastructure for Conservation and Heritage Science; and Deputy Chair, Research Diversity Advisory Panel and a Member of Main Panel D for the Research Excellence Framework 2029. Her new book The Public Consumption of Architecture will be published by Routledge.