My research focuses on women artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Birmingham from 1880 to 1930. It investigates the conception of the craftswoman on a regional level through interlinked socio-economical, religious and political parameters, all of which are framed within the broader artistic and social structures of the Arts and Crafts movement.

The artists whose work I examine in particular are Kate Bunce, Mary Newill, Florence Camm, Margaret A. Rope, Celia Levetus, Georgie Gaskin, and May Morris. Structured around a material analysis of a small representative selection of artworks in a range of media and techniques – tempera painting, stained glass, book-illustration, and embroidery, my thesis will explore the particularities of these objects and how they came to be, revealing in the process the web of institutional and personal networks instrumental to this production.

This project stems from an MA dissertation on ‘Arts and Crafts Children’s Book-Illustration: Birmingham Women Artists’ carried out at the University of Warwick (2011-2012) and is inscribed in a wider interest in the arts of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe, fostered during a BA at the University of Lausanne in History of Art, History and Aesthetic of Film, and English (2007-2010). It is much aided by a 2012-13 departmental grant, and a Chancellor’s scholarship as of October 2013.

'Shedding Light on Arts and Crafts Stained Glass Making in the Twentieth Century', Research Seminar, History of Art, University of Warwick, 25 November 2015
‘Secret Social Networks: Re-discovering the Friendships and Patronage behind the Ex Libris’, History of Art Postgraduate Conference, University of Warwick, 13 May 2015
‘Secret Social Networks: Re-discovering the Friendships and Patronage behind the Ex-Libris’, Nineteenth Century Research Seminars, University of Edinburgh, 23 April 2015
‘Arts and Crafts Books: Birmingham Women Artists’, Friends of the Centre for West Midlands History, Newsletter 21 (April 2015), p. 4
‘Arts and Crafts Books: Birmingham Women Artists’, Research Seminar, Centre for West Midlands History, University of Birmingham, 25 February 2015
‘Conveying Life and Meaning in Needlework: Mary Newill as Teacher of Embroidery at the Birmingham Municipal School of Art’, Victorian Education, a postgraduate conference organised by the Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar, part of the British Association for Victorian Studies, 23 January 2015
Rituals from Life to Death: Performance, Arts and Society, Postgraduate Conference, University of Warwick, 25 June 2014, co-organiser
‘Christian Piety Materialised: the Bunce Longworth Reredos’, History of Art Postgraduate Conference, University of Warwick, 13 May 2013
‘Arts and Crafts Children’s Book-Illustration: Birmingham Women Artists’, unpublished MA dissertation (University of Warwick, September 2012)
‘Arts and Crafts Children’s Book-Illustration: Birmingham Women Artists’, History of Art Postgraduate Conference, University of Warwick, 23 May 2012

Postgraduate Award: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (PGA: T&L in HE), awarded June 2015

'Study Skills', First year BA module, Assistant tutor, Fall 2014

'Introduction to Art History: The Natural World and the Arts of Modernity', First year BA module, Seminar tutor, Fall 2013

contact: c.d.fitzgerald@warwick.ac.uk