Professor of Art and Cultural Heritage
Dana Arnold FSA is Professor of Art and Cultural Heritage at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. Her current research focuses on feminist and decolonising alternatives to canonical architectural histories and includes Women and Architectural History (2024) and Architecture and Ekphrasis (2020). She has also written extensively on the historiography of architecture and urbanism in relation to social and cultural theory including Reading Architectural History (2002) and the co-edited volumes Biographies and Space (2014); Architecture as Experience (2004) and Re-thinking Architectural Historiography (2006), which was shortlisted for the RIBA Pevsner Prize. A number of her books, articles and edited volumes have made a substantial contribution to our understanding of London as a global city and as a visual phenomenon including a trilogy of monographs The Spaces of the Hospital: Spatiality and Urban Change in London 1680-1820, (2013), Rural Urbanism: London landscapes in the early nineteenth century (2006) and Re-presenting the Metropolis (2000 and pbk 2018). Her work has also considered London in transnational contexts with other cities, especially Paris and Tianjin, China. This work included funded collaborative projects with Université Paris I (Pantheon-Sorbonne) and Tianjin University as well as Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris; University of Oslo; and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has held visiting fellowships at Tate Asia, The Getty Research Institute and Yale University and honorary professorships at Tianjin University and the Middle East Technical University, Ankara where she also co-led a British Academy funded project on cross-cultural relationships between Britain and countries in the Middle East in an Ottoman and post Ottoman context.
She is Chair of the Programme Board of RICHeS (Research Infrastructure for Conservation and Heritage Science) https://www.riches.ukri.org/ and Deputy Chair, Research Diversity Advisory Panel and a member of Main Panel D for Framework REF 2029 (Research Excellence Framework). Until 2024 she was a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Advisory Board. She was also a member of Sub-panel 32: Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory for REF 2021.
Her new book The Public Consumption of Architecture will be published by Routledge.
Selected publications
Books
- D Arnold, Women and Architectural History: The Monstrous Regiment Then and Now, Routledge, 2024, Judges’ Commendation the Colvin Prize SAHGB
- D Arnold, British Architecture: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, OUP, 2024
- D Arnold, Architecture and Ekphrasis: Space, Time and the Embodied Description of the Past, Manchester University Press, 2020
- D Arnold, A Short Book About Art, TATE Publishing, second edition 2025 (2015) (translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Latvian and German)
- D Arnold, Art History: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, OUP, second edition 2020 (2004), translated into Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Bosnian, Swedish, Dutch, Vietnamese, Slovenian and Greek.
Journal Articles
- D Arnold Visual Ekphrasis and the articulation of the Past, in Noah Heringman and Crystal Lake (eds) Ancient Objects and New Media, Journal Special Issue of Modern Philology, vol. 120, no 1, August 2022
Chapters in Books
- Written in Stone: Eleanor Coade and the London building world of the late-eighteenth and early- nineteenth century in Alborz Dianat and Kathleen James-Chakraborty (eds), Minding her Business, Leuven University Press, 2026
- Dialogues interculturels : Le Collège anglo-chinois de Tientsin in Nubuo Aoki, Maria Gravari-Barbas, Christine Mengin, Pierre Singaravélou, Hugues Tertrais, Xu Subin (sous dir), Tianjin, transferts mondiaux et appropriations : Architecture et aménagement urbain dans la Chine Moderne, 近代中国的建筑与城市规划：在天津的传播与本土化, Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne (PUPS) 2023
- Whose Country House? in Joan Coutu, Jon Stobart and Peter Nelson Lindfield (eds), Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800, Montreal and Ontario, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023
- Ambiguous Exchanges: Transcultural Dialogues between Ancient Egypt and the West, in Anna Ferrari and Ben Hinson (eds) Visions of Ancient Egypt, Norwich, Sainsbury Centre, 2023
- Cherchez la Femme: Finding the Feminised Line, in Dirk van den Heuvel (ed) Architecture Archives of the Future, Nieuwe Instituut and Delft University of Technology, 2023