Francesca Berry

I joined the University of Birmingham in 2005 as Lecturer in History of Art having previously held a temporary lectureship 2003-5 in History of Art at the University of Warwick. I studied for my BA, MA and PhD in the Department of History of Art at University College London (my PhD under the supervision of Prof Tamar Garb) and then proceeded to an AHRC post-doctoral research fellowship at the Royal College of Art, Royal Holloway, and Victoria & Albert Museum. Between 2013 and 2016 I was Head of the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at University of Birmingham and took this role up again in 2017-18. From 2010 to 2022 I was an Editor of the Oxford Art Journal, published by Oxford University Press, and was Chair of its editorial group from 2017 to 2022. Currently, I am Head of Research for the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music. In 2017 I was promoted to Associate Professor in History of Art at the University of Birmingham. 

The main focus of my research is the artistic and visual culture of domesticity in France 1880-1940 as framed by questions deriving from feminist methodologies. On the one hand my research lies in painterly, avant-garde, domesticities and, on the other, in mass-consumed, mediated domesticities. Either way, I consider how and to what historical effect these domesticities are productive of identities and subjectivities that are sexually differentiated.

Currently I am completing a book examining the personal and social politics of domesticity in the work and working arrangements of French Nabi artist Edouard Vuillard, Edouard Vuillard and the Nabis: Art and the Politics of Domesticity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). This will constitute the first book-length feminist engagement with Vuillard and Intimisme more generally. I was guest curator to the international loan exhibition ‘Maman: Vuillard and Madame Vuillard’ at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, October 2018 to January 2019. I authored the exhibition’s fully-illustrated catalogue, Maman: Vuillard and Madame Vuillard, published 2018 by Paul Holberton Publishing.

I am also currently researching mass media publications associated with the hugely popular interwar Salon des Arts Ménagers (1923-1983), including the journal L'Art Ménager and the annual exhibition poster. My article ‘Housewife Writ Large: Marie mécanique, Paulette Bernège and New Feminist Domesticity in Interwar France’ that critically analyses the representation of housewife-automata in SAM publicity materials was published May 2017 in the Oxford Art Journal. A further article on the topic of interwar French mass-media domesticity, ‘Housework, The Eighth Art’, is planned.

I am in the process of building a research project on the theme of ‘Nabi Politics: Art at the Vanguard of Debate after 1888’. This project will investigate the political and social attitudes of the influential Nabi artists, who rose to artistic prominence in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. By studying their work, objectives and affiliations in unprecedented detail, the project will develop an innovative critical perspective that casts much-needed new light on the Nabis' approach to art and design, promotes public engagement with their work and offers fresh insights into the turbulent relationship between culture and politics in 1890s France; the decade of feminist congresses, labour agitation, anarchist bombings, presidential assassination and the Dreyfus Affair.

I have been researcher on three RCUK funded collaborative research projects: as co-investigator to AHRC Suburban Birmingham: Spaces and Places, 1880-1960 (University of Birmingham, Birmingham Museums Trust, Library of Birmingham, 2009-2012) and as postdoctoral research fellow at AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior (Royal College of Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2001-2003). I was Principal Investigator and lead supervisor to the successfully completed AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award ‘Displaying Childhood Spaces’.