University of East London

Faculty Member, School of Arts and Digital Industries

Dean of Arts and Digital Industries

About

Professor Catherine Harper is Dean of Arts and Digital Industries at University of East London, representing UEL on the UK Council for Higher Education in Art and Design (CHEAD). Previous posts include Head of the School of Architecture and Design at University of Brighton; Reader in Textiles, Research Coordinator and UG/PGT Leadership for Textile Design and Contemporary Crafts at University for the Creative Arts; Academic Coordinator for MA Design for Textile Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London; 3 year Research Bursary Award holder in Textiles at Goldsmiths College, University of London; and year-long Artist-in-Residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

Catherine is a Northern Irish woven textiles practitioner by origin, having specialised in large-scale public commissions, and exhibition/performance work. Her work may be seen in situ in, for example, the National Concert Hall and the Ministry for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Dublin; the Waterfront Hall and the Royal Victoria and Mater Hospitals, Belfast; and the University of Ulster and the Women’s Centre, Derry.

She now writes on textiles, the body, gender and subjective narratives, is UK Editor of Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture (Berg), was a Contributing Editor for selvedge, and sits on the Editorial Board of The International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education (Taylor & Francis). She published her first book – Intersex (Berg) in 2007, and her edited multi-volume Textiles: Primary and Critical Sources (Berg) is in press and due out in January 2012. She is currently working on a second solo-authored book – Fabrics of Desire (also for Berg) – supported by a University of Brighton Research Sabbatical at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland (2011-12) – and published her first short story in The Dublin Quarterly in Autumn 2011.

A member of the AHRC Peer Review College, and an Arts Council of England Artistic Advisor, Catherine is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and of the Royal Society for Encouragement of the Arts, a member of the International Foundation of Fashion Technologies Institutions (IFFTI), and sits on the international committee for Fashion in Fiction. A founder member of the LGBT Queer Life Research Hub, she was co-organiser of the Lesbian Lives: Revolting: Bodies, Politics & Genders conference at University of Brighton in collaboration with University College, Dublin, in 2011, and will convene the Fashion in Fiction conference in the UK in 2014.

Her current research is supported by the AHRC, Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, and she has experience of securing funding for and leading key institutional projects including a TSB-funded Knowledge Transfer Partnership, Creative Campus Initiative / Cultural Olympiad schemes, Invest to Gain Capital Investment plans, and Quality Assurance consultancy in the private Higher Education sector.

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