Dr Jane Webb  

Jane Webb studied art history, design history and anthropology at undergraduate level at the University of East Anglia, and then went on to do an MA in Anthropology of Art (now Material Culture) with Daniel Miller, Suzanne Küchler, Christopher Tilley and Barbara Bender at University College London.

Having already developed an interest in theory and practice during her MA, Jane became increasingly focussed on the relationship of writing to making during her funded PhD at the School of Art and Design, University of Wolverhampton. Her interest was not just through the subject matter of her research which concerned the discourse of design emerging from the lives of the politicians, artists and manufacturers that made up the brief community of people around the 1835-6 Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures, but also in the method of writing about that subject at PhD level. Embracing the atmosphere of the art school, she helped organise one of the first UK conferences on practice-led doctoral research in 1998.

Around this time, Jane also became part of the Design Transformation Group, a collective of designers, artists, educators and theorists and has since been working with a number of makers and artists collaboratively. This has led her to re-examine the nature of research from an academic standpoint and challenge this through the production of textual but also material outcomes – a technique particularly developed during her residency as the critical writer on the Arts Council funded Here and There project, from 2004 – 2006.

Jane is currently a Senior Lecturer on the Contemporary Art History degree, while also leading contextual studies across the Fashion, Textiles in Practice, Three Dimensional Design and Interior Design programmes. She has taught at MA level and supervises practice-led PhDs.

Her latest project entitled ‘Selvedge Life’ involves work around The Gallery of Costume collection at Platt Hall in Manchester. Some of the outcomes of which will be a series of eight books (provisionally titled Fashion Perspectives) concerning subjects of dress history that lie at the peripheries of fashion. The first of these will be published by Bloomsbury in 2015.