Sean Ketteringham

@seeanate

Thesis Title: 'Modern Homes, Modern Britain: domestic culture and the popularisation of the avant-garde, 1913-1951'

Supervisor: Dr Rebecca Beasley

Research Interests: Domestic modernity, architecture, visual culture, Virginia Woolf, life-writing, word and image, T.S. Eliot, tradition and anarchism, landscape, ruralism-urbanism, modernism/postmodernism

Doctoral Research: My research focuses on the function of domestic space as a crucible for the popularisation of avant-garde ideas across the fields of literature, architecture, and the visual arts in the first half of the twentieth century. From the initial social ruptures and outrage caused by modern art and literature in Britain between 1910 and 1922, I will trace how a gradual popularisation of rarefied aesthetic trends can be mapped onto dramatic changes to living conditions and public discourse on the architecture of the home. This will demonstrate the power of domestic space as a site for political change and public engagement in the period, as well as a site of private shelter. I place specific emphasis on the dissemination and development of avant-garde ideas through magazines such as Vogue and Country Life, alongside the work of Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Elizabeth Bowen, Herbert Read, John Betjeman and the Sitwells.