Professor Victoria Kelley

Research statement

Victoria Kelley is a historian whose research encompasses a range of subjects grouped under the heading ‘relationships between people and things’. Her 2010 book, Soap and Water: cleanliness, dirt and the working classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain is a study of how material culture is formed in practice by ideologies and values: it examines the complex meanings of clean and dirty bodies, clothes, and homes. Her recent work on this subject includes a chapter titled ‘Home and Work’ for the Bloomsbury Cultural History of the Home series (2020).

In 2013 Victoria published Surface Tensions: surface, finish and the meaning of objects (co-edited with Dr Glenn Adamson, V&A) an investigation of the surfaces of objects as the site of material interactions and processes. Her other work on surfaces includes journal articles and book chapters investigating surface and maintenance in textiles, ‘surface anxiety’ and ‘surface delight’ in the Victorian home, and contemporary issues of surface and taste.

Since 2014, Victoria had been researching the history of London’s street markets. Street markets are an overlooked site of urban modernity and the most vigorous outgrowth of the informal economy that flourishes below and beyond the recognised institutions of the consumer city. This research has resulted in a new interpretation of London’s urban geographies, moving beyond the accepted view of the West End as the consumer city and the East as the city of poverty, and demonstrating that the informality of the street markets has been a powerful force in shaping representations of London and its people. Victoria’s book on this subject was published by Manchester University Press in September 2019. 

Victoria has recently extended her research on street markets and the informal economy, working on the history of the photographic representation of London’s street markets. Her current research is Stall Tales, a community-based, citizen-history and heritage project in Lewisham street market in South-East London. Stall Tales is a partnership between UCA, Lewisham Borough Council and Lewisham Heritage, and is funded by a National Archives Engagement Award.

Victoria is also working on the role of informal trading in networks of fashion production, on class transvestism and the role of dressing up and dressing down in narratives of social difference from the mid nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and on a co-edited volume on boundaries and borders in design history, based on the 2024 Design History Society annual conference, which she co-convened with colleagues at UCA.

Research supervision

Research supervision

Victoria is interested in hearing from research degree applicants whose proposals lie in any of her areas of research interest, or from practice-research students whose research intersects with her expertise.

Research degree students (completed):

• Dee Honeybun, Elevating the Everyday: moving images in the shop window, (UCA, September 2025)
• Mona Craven, The Space In-between Whitework and Indigo Resist: unravelling cultural dislocation through symbolic cloth, (UCA, September 2024)
• Tim Savage, Teaching to the Line: how do creative arts technicians in higher education conceive of their pedagogies? (UCA, July 2024)
• Cassie Davies-Strodder, Emilie Grigsby’s Wardrobe at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London: the challenges and opportunities of personal accretions of dress for a museum of art and design (Central Saint Martins UAL, AHRC-funded studentship with V&A Collaborative Doctoral Partnership, April 2024)
• Henrica Langh, Bleeding Garments: a magical and poetic approach to the phenomenology of intensely evocative garments (UCA, September 2023)
• Loucia Manopoulou, Curatorial, Performance, Crafts: a shift in contemporary practice (UCA, January 2023)
• Priyanka Verma, Female Desire in Contemporary Bollywood (UCA, February 2022)
• Charmaine Dambuza, Mourning and Melancholia in Zimbabwean Cinema and Culture (UCA, January 2022)
• Ollie Gapper, Book-Space; exploring the potentialities for intimate communication within the photobook (UCA, December 2021)
• Denise Jones, Embroidering and the Body Under Threat: Suffragette Embroidered Cloths Worked in Holloway Prison, 1911-1912 (UCA, September 2020)
• Jennie Jewitt-Harris, Anything but the Eyes: an investigation through drawing into the common reluctance to donate corneas after death (UCA, 2019)
• Beverly Ayling Smith, The space between mourning and melancholia: the use of cloth in contemporary art practice to materialise the work of mourning (UCA, 2016)
• Carol Quarini, The Domestic Veil: exploring the net curtain through the uncanny and the gothic (UCA, 2015)
• Michelle Jones, Less Than Art, Greater Than Trade: English couture and the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers in the 1930s and 1940s (RCA, 2015)
• Andrew Jackson, Understanding the experience of the amateur maker: what are the intrinsic rewards associated with non-professional designing and making? (UCA, 2011)

Research degree students (current):

• Dan Chen, The Revitalisation of Hanfu among Chinese women: a Gendered Perspective on Material Culture, Historical Persistence, and Contemporary Identity Negotiation
• Rose Gridneff, Designer as Archivist: The Archival Turn in Graphic Design Practice
• Sakaynah Hunter, The impact of personal style on perceived influential leadership and performance in luxury organisations
• Charles Lambert, The role of email newsletters in the future of journalism 
• Ezinma Mbonu, The Ageing Body: dress, dementia and identity
• Amanda Raine, Wardrobe Studies and Storytelling through Archives and Exhibitions - a collection of the ordinary and everyday.
• Xiaofan Zhang, Cross-cultural research in Chinese Wallpaper