Sean Ketteringham

I am the Research Associate for ‘Pioneers of Local Thinking, 1740-1820’, Arts of Place’s British Academy-funded project. Between October 2023 and May 2024 I will be contributing to all aspects of Arts of Place and helping Alex and Jessica shape our new programme of events. We are setting out to explore the creative minds of those artists and writers who revolutionised how place, locality, community, and the natural world were observed and understood in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British culture.

My research interests are centred around artistic, architectural, and literary articulations of English national identity in relation to the terminal decline of the British Empire during the twentieth century. My doctoral research, completed at Oxford in 2022 under the supervision of Rebecca Beasley, explored these ideas through the cultural crucible of domestic space between 1910 and 1948. It spanned suburban developments, the picturesque, modernist homes, and architectural preservation. I’m currently turning this work into a monograph for Oxford University Press titled Architectures of Identity: English Modernism, Domesticity and Imperial Decline. My new project at the Henry Moore Institute, titled ‘Postwar Folk’, extends these concerns to the period after 1945 through an examination of the triangular bond between postwar sculpture, English folk art, and so-called ethnographic museum collections.

Thinking around deep time, heritage, place and locality is marbled throughout my research and I have regularly worked in the heritage sector and on research residencies including at the National Trust, the Twentieth Century Society, the John Latham Foundation (Flat Time House), Grizedale Arts, and the Charles Moore Foundation, Texas. Prior to my doctorate I received my BA in English at the University of Liverpool, and my MA in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute.