jAnE PAVitt - Victoria and Albert Museum

Marta Ajmar-WollheimSince January Marta has been Acting Head ofGraduate Studies at V&A, while continuing to teachon the Renaissance specialism. Her researchinterests lie principally in the material culture ofRenaissance and Early Modern Italy and theMediterranean world. She has published on thedomestic interior, gender, eroticism, sociability andthe material culture of childhood. More recently shehas also been focusing on globalization and theearly modern movement of objects, and on therelationship between material culture and healthyliving. She is currently developing a new researchproject on shared materiality, exploring theinterconnections between different artisanalpractices, languages and objects in RenaissanceItaly.She is currently working as co-investigator andco-author with Prof. Sandra Cavallo and Dr.TessaStorey (Royal Holloway) on a new research projectfor a book, supported by the Wellcome Trust,‘Healthy Homes, Healthy Bodies. Domestic Cultureand the Prevention of Disease in Renaissance andEarly Modern Italy’. The project examines theinterconnections between the domesticenvironment and new ideas of wellbeing involvingeveryday objects and practices – from drinking tosleeping and sex to the contemplation of pleasantartefacts – in the pursuit of physical and mentalhealth. In relation to this research Marta has givenpapers at the Renaissance Society of AmericaAnnual Meeting (Venice, April), at the 79thAnglo-American Conference of Historians (IHR,University of London, July) and at the MedicalSociety of London.Marta is very interested (and a passionate believer!)in collaborative work. In 2009-10 she has been amember of a number of cross-disciplinary researchprojects, including the AHRC Global Arts Project(University of Warwick, Ashmolean Museum, V&A)and The Centre for the History of Innovation andCreativity (Chic). She is currently involved in theresearch network Uses of the Visual in Early ModernGermany (Cambridge University, British Museumand V&A). In the summer she set up with Dr. AngelaMcShane and Dr.Christine Guth the new Institute ofHistorical Research/V&A – Early Modern MaterialCultures Research Seminar, of which she is coconvenor.This is designed to combine academicpapers with handling sessions and to bring togetherdifferent constituencies of scholars based withinuniversities and museums in conversations inspiredby objects.For the V&A/RCA MA in History of Design Martateaches mostly on the Renaissance specialism.She has supervised a wide range of MA researchprojects on European topics from 1400–1600. Atthe moment she is supervising one PhD project:Craft identity and innovation: investigating thematerial and spatial dimensions of guildcommunities and Livery Halls in Early ModernLondon: Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, AHRC DoctoralAward, V&A/RCA. She was external examiner forSarah Bercusson’s PhD dissertation, Gift-Giving,Consumption and the Female Court in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Queen Mary’s, University of London,Spring 2010). She is keen to supervise MPhil andPhD students who wish to research the materialculture of Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, inparticular with regard to the domestic interior,gender and the household, artisanal practices andknowledge and early modern globalization. Lastyear she taught sessions on a variety ofpostgraduate courses, including the University ofWarwick and Birkbeck College (University ofLondon).She continues to serve on the AHRC Peer ReviewCollege and the IHR Mellon Fellowships Committee(Art History). Over the past months Marta hascontributed as a reviewer to Home Cultures(Berg, Oxford).Marta has been actively supporting a numberof museum projects. She oversees the AHRCCollaborative Doctoral Awards at the V&A. She hasbeen responsible for setting up the new Cross-Collections Scholarship Programme, designed tofoster curatorial scholarship within the V&Acollections. She has contributed as a consultant andsupervisor to the D’Azeglio exhibition project inconnection with the Musei Civici of Turin.Recently completed/forthcoming publicationsinclude: “The spirit is ready, but the flesh is tired”:erotic objects and marriage in early modern Italy’,in The Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, ed. byS. Matthews-Grieco (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2010);‘Geography and the Environment’, in A CulturalHistory of Childhood and Family (vol.3), SandraCavallo and Silvia Evangelisti eds (Berg, Oxford,2010); ‘The Global Renaissance: An Investigation ofCross-Cultural Objects in the Early Modern’,(co-authored with Luca Molà), in Global DesignHistory, Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and SarahTeasley eds, Routledge, London and New York(forthcoming 2011).16/17Vessel for filtering hot drinks, tin-glazed earthenware, Castelli(Italy), late sixteenth century, Musei Civici, Milan.