Abstracts and Biographies
The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, Identity
Panel A: Hand-Workers
Melanie Bell and Alice Sage - Handmade: The Invisible Craft and Labour of Film Costume (short film).
Abstract:
The handiwork of costume prop maker Martin Adams has appeared in over 800 film, TV and theatre productions since 1976, from forging armour and jewellery for the Life of Brian (1978), to crafting Rose’s combs and mirrors on the Titanic (1997), creating the eponymous razor blades in Peaky Blinders (2012), and reproducing Queen Mary’s royal jewels for Downton Abbey (2019). Described as "a unique talent" by costume designers, Martin is the embodiment of the highly trained hand described by Richard Sennet (2008). Rings, earrings and crowns handmade by Martin appear in close-up on the screen, yet Martin himself is rarely credited; he is one of countless costume outworkers whose names are missing from screen credits, rendering their creative practice especially vulnerable to historical loss. Freelancers and outworkers are the 'invisible hands' in the labour of film costuming. In 2024, the Film Costumes in Action team filmed Martin in his workroom in the Midlands, making a crown for a new production. The short film (6 mins) presented here foregrounds Martin’s hands at work: his dexterous handling of tools, his expressive demonstration of techniques of ‘burring’, ‘plating’ and ‘cutting’; we recorded his gestural reflections on his practice and the physical effects of aging on his hands. This film makes a lifetime of skilled work visible but also prompts us to move beyond celebration (important though that is), to open up a space for critical reflection on what the invisibility of the craftworkers’ 'hand in the making' says about film historiography.
Biographies:
Melanie Bell is a Professor of Film History (University of Leeds) who works with oral history, archival records and screen ephemera to recover ‘lost’ histories of women’s screen work. She is currently PI for the Film Costumes in Action project which records histories of costuming British film since 1965.
Dr Alice Sage is a cultural historian and curator, interested in the material crafts of fantasy. Often this work centres on textiles, and she has also curated exhibitions about automata, animation and dolls houses. She is currently Film Costumes in Action Research Fellow, investigating the art and craft of costuming film.
Anna Duffield - Embroidery-as-Research: Exploring the history and process of needlework through the re-creation of a family embroidery sampler.
Abstract:
Completed in 1830, Ann Orr’s embroidery sampler is imbued with notions of nineteenth century girlhood and femininity, creative expression, and practical skill. Passed down within my family for 195 years, until reaching its most recent resting place in my grandparent’s home, the sampler is tangible evidence of a young woman leaving her mark by demonstrating her skills and knowledge of embroidery. In this presentation, I explore how re-centring the knowledge of embroidery held within my own hands enabled me to understand the entanglements between nineteenth century young women, their craft, and their identity. Employing an autoethnographic understanding of material culture and women’s history, I stitched a reinterpretation of Ann’s sampler, viewing nineteenth century embroidery through a lens of my contemporary tactile and emotive experiences.
Although embodied research methods have been acknowledged as vital within material culture and heritage discourse, the process of re-creating textile objects has remained as a sub-genre within the field of fashion history. As the fields of heritage, material culture and textile history move toward validating this form of processual knowledge, this paper demonstrates the use of making-as-research for enabling a deeper understanding of historical textiles and the socio-cultural stories that they tell. Beyond historical research, this process created a space for the introspective questioning of myself as an embroiderer, enlightening how the hands-on skills that Ann and I share connect us over time. In doing so, my stitching challenged the supposedly linear temporality of a family heirloom, creating a dialogue between living and deceased family members, whilst bringing near-forgotten skills back into the present. This paper analyses the process of embroidery-as-research, focusing on the progressive nature of embodied knowledge, and demonstrating the importance of creating a synergy between practice and theory in historical research.
Biography:
Anna Duffield is a first-year PhD student, working with De Montfort University and the Royal School of Needlework. Her research questions how nineteenth and twentieth century women engaged with ideas of empire and coloniality through the needlework they bought and made, with a specific focus on the collection and archive at the Royal School of Needlework. She is a self-taught embroiderer, with an interest in exploring stitching as a mindful practice, and as a way to connect modern and historical identities.
Kate Sekules - Hand/Mending: News from the Coalface.
Abstract:
Mending, though (formerly) a structural imperative in dress cultures everywhere, has endured millennia of invisibility as unvalued labour. Then, starting around 2012, mending became a fashionable craft practice and social media meme. What connects these two extremes of historical subsistence and contemporary trend is, of course, the hand. Mending is a handwork technology with deep roots, and it is also a practice we urgently need to revive as planetary upheaval is exacerbated by current dress habitus.
With many images and examples, I will present an overview of how this most ancient of textile methodologies behaves in contemporary sociocultural, economic, and political settings. For over a decade, I have been immersed in the subject. I teach it in classes, groups, clubs, online, in universities, and—as Dr Mend—in surgeries, and am about to defend my doctoral dissertation, “A History and Theory of Mending,” based on case studies spanning 145,000 years.
Locating the hand in material traces from Middle Stone Age Africa or Iron Age Alpine salt mines requires transdisciplinary analysis, viewing textile as a system developing through time, and it is always profoundly human. Each mend signals expenditure of time and resources, skill, and creativity. Each is a culturally specific response to structural failure, not a disfiguring scar of poverty, but the reification of a generative mindset. From twelfth century embroidered manuscript mends to schoolgirl samplers; massed darns in the late-eighteenth century silk stockings of the richest man in America to 28 menders in nine countries art-darning a dead man’s 80-year-old socks, now on a five-museum tour, this evidence of the hand is astonishing and ravishing. The news from the mending coalface is a counternarrative to the familiar calamity of the destructive, hegemonic fashion industrial complex. Mending hands have good stories to tell.
Biography:
Cultural and dress historian Kate Sekules researches and teaches mending as an academic and practical discipline. She is completing her doctoral dissertation, A History and Theory of Mending at Bard Graduate Center, NYC, is assistant professor of fashion history at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and of “Mending Fashion” at Parsons School of Design (BA) and BGC (MA). She has presented research at over two dozen symposia internationally, lectures widely at institutions both academic and corporate, and runs frequent events and repair clinics. She is author of MEND! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto (Penguin, 2020).
Panel B: Victorian Hands
Tilly Guthrie Keeping in Touch: Tactile materiality in the correspondence of the British blind community, c. 1840-1905.
Abstract
The introduction of the Penny Post in Britain had sweeping implications for communication and identity-formation through handwriting. But simultaneously, the blind community was facing a ‘babel’ of tactile alphabets in the decades before the standardisation of Braille (Armitage 1886). At the whims of sighted philanthropists, many institutionalised blind children were taught to read with embossed scripts designed for the eyes rather than the finger. This both inhibited the literary progress of students, and approached tactile print as a prosthetic substitute for visual reading (Olsén 2013). My research argues for the linguistic autonomy of tactile texts. Taking a grapholinguistic approach - or rather ‘haptolinguistic’ - I aim to show that the material form of writing connotes meaning independent of speech and of visual text. Embossed letters make literal the ‘touching’ element of correspondence, and yet their absence from both epistolary history and disability studies is striking.
This paper will demonstrate that a failure to centre the haptic in nineteenth-century blind education inhibited participation in correspondence culture, and by extension in a national identity forged through networks of letters. I will also show that material differences in epistolary practice have semantic relevance, and that this posed unique challenges to the blind community. Through embodied encounters with embossed, dictated, or stencilled letters in archives, I attempt to reconstruct the possible methods of blind handwriting. The questions I ask of these various writing techniques are: what was the physical experience of writing and reading in a given medium; what were the cultural implications of its material features; and to what extent does it safeguard the privacy and autonomy of the correspondents.
Biography
Tilly Guthrie is a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis examines the interactions between blind communities and the postal service in the wake of the 1840 Penny Post reforms, with a particular interest in tactile materiality. She also collaborates with the RNIB and the Braillists Foundation to deliver public lectures on the history of Braille.
Jay Sullivan - Severed Hands in Victorian Egyptomania.
Abstract
Victorian Egyptomania is littered with moments of touch between the living and the dead. These hands are a key trope of the Egyptianised Gothic genre, made up of now forgotten novels and short stories about ancient Egyptian mummies returning to life to seek retribution or romance as well as cursed object tales. Now mostly forgotten, from the 1880s through to the 1920s, it was more popular than the vampire genre.
Drawing from my book Egyptian Gothic 1884-1920 (2025, Palgrave Macmillian) this paper argues that these hands are symbols of colonial revolt, literally pushing back at those who intrude upon their resting places. Using Egyptianised Gothic novels such as Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and The Living Mummy (1910) I will argue that severed hands present the reader with questions of will—does the hand act independently from the brain it is no longer connected to? Without a body, they offer a transgressive form of touch which is more horrible, more visceral than those that act as part of a whole.
The tropes of disembodied hands are not unique to fiction: firsthand travel narratives ruminate on the uncanny, totemic power of hands. In doing so, they introduce a distinct element of Gothic horror to what are allegedly serious accounts. I will look at accounts from collectors, travellers and archaeologists to show how these hands are coveted and eroticised, turning the corpse into a collectible.
Biography
Dr. Jay Sullivan is a writer and researcher based in London. A digital communications expert, she has worked for a variety of public sector institutions including the Natural History Museum, the RAF Museum and the London Fire Brigade. She holds a Ph.D. from Roehampton University and an MA in Victorian Studies from Birkbeck College. Her research examines Victorian popular culture, with a focus on the sensory and Egypt reception studies. Egyptian Gothic 1884-1920 is her first book.
Jonathan Westaway - ‘But there is Art and ART’: Winckelmann, Pater and the Haptic Aesthetics of Mountaincraft.
Abstract
In his essay ‘The Mountaineer as Artist’, George Leigh Mallory outlined his aesthetic theory of mountaineering, likening it to the emotional experience of the sublime comparable to the experience of music and art, differentiating it from the merely ludic. This paper explores the influence of the nineteenth-century aesthetic movement and the works of Walter Pater on Mallory’s mountaincraft and mountain writing. Pater’s injunction in the conclusion to Studies in the History of The Renaissance (1873) ‘to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy’ of transient aesthetic experience influenced generations of undergraduates and shaped elite homosocial and homosexual subcultures around mountaineering in the period 1873-1914. Pater’s queer aesthetic provided the language to describe and to idealize the fit male body. In both touching bodies and touching stone, elite homosexual subcultures within mountaineering found in Pater a shared aesthetic of the haptic and the tactile. Central to this was Pater’s essay on Winckelmann. Pater’s Winckelmann ‘handles everything’. His ‘antiquarian handling of Greek statues puts him in touch with both his own homoeroticism and that of Greek culture’. Handling sculpture, handling stone, handling bodies assumed a revolutionary method in Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’ essay. Within the elite intellectual and homosexual subcultures of mountaineering, both Pater’s coded aesthetic discourse and climbers’ own hands connected them to the aesthetics and the erotics of stone. Elite philhellenism in bourgeois mountaineering circles enabled Mallory to conceptualize mountaineering as one of the plastic arts, shaping the fit male body, forming character via fugitive emotional experience, creating the very image of beauty through a mountaincraft that sought to enable the Paterian ecstatic moment comparable to the classical Greek notion of the aretic ecstasy, the fusing of art and athletic experience. If ‘Paterian is an adjective for a certain way of being alive’ then mountaineering in this period was Paterian, a synthesis of art, flesh and the world experienced through the lithic intimacy of touching stone.
Biography
Dr. Jonathan Westaway is Reader in Cultural and Environmental History at the University of Lancashire, UK and is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers, the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Royal Asiatic Society. His research focusses on imperial cultures of exploration in both polar and mountain environments. His recent research has examined British imperial governance, knowledge practices and leisure cultures in Highland Asia and Central Asia c.1850–1947 and their representation in travel writing, photography and film. He was project lead on the AHRC Research Network Other Everests: Commemoration, Memory and Meaning and the British Everest Expedition Centenaries, 2021-2024 (2022-2024) and is currently project lead on the AHRC funded Other Everests public engagement project (2024-2025) comprising of exhibitions and cultural programmes with project partners The National Trust, The Kendal Mountain Festival and The Confluence Collective, Kalimpong, India.
Panel C: Iconic Hands
Eve Connor - The Many Thinking Hands of Jack Sheppard.
Abstract
By virtue of their subject, literary adaptations of the eighteenth-century thief and prison-breaker, Jack Sheppard, are interested in hands, what they touch, what they take, and how they think. Developing research undertaken at the University of Cambridge, this paper proposes one such adaptation, William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard: A Romance (1839-40), as a forerunner to the epistemology of the hand theorised by pragmatist thinkers like John Dewey.
Connecting recent Victorian studies discussions around tactility and craft with a range of textual and visual adaptations of the Jack Sheppard story, it locates the significant and transgressive power embodied in Jack’s hands. Moreover, and most excitingly, it identifies how Victorian working-class audiences mutually handled and were handled by Jack, shaping him into a model for deconstructing broader social hierarchies of manual and mental skill.
Biography
Eve Connor is a writer from the English Midlands. Five of her plays have been produced by the University of Cambridge, where she graduated with a BA (Hons) in English in 2025. She is currently pursuing an MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford.
Sarah Potvin - Walt Whitman’s Hands.
Abstract
Plaster casts of the American poet Walt Whitman’s hands reside in a vault in Houghton Library, Harvard’s special collections repository. Nestled into a custom enclosure, these hands present as an unmatched pair: the right, a more direct facsimile of elegant fingers, puckered knuckles; the left, a rough, pocked, seamed block.
As Horace Traubel recounts in his diaries of his time with Whitman, one of Whitman’s hands was cast in life by the Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins, in 1891; the second was cast after Whitman’s death in 1892. Traubel records of the life cast: “Eakins showed me a hand (W.’s) already done, ‘but not first-rate: he trembled so when it was done.’” The rough cast of Whitman’s left hand provides its own account: of Whitman’s physical deterioration towards the end of his life, palsied by strokes and beset by trembling. After death, Whitman’s hand is still and compliant with the sculptors’ efforts; the pressure of the mold met little resistance.
In the IIIF-compliant images Harvard posts of these hands, they appear in two distinctive settings. We see them in the familiar placelessness suspension of the digitized surrogate spotlight against a black backdrop. But we also glimpse these cast hands held, themselves, in the brightly nitrile-clad hands of stewards, who hold them up to the camera for capture.
This presentation locates Whitman’s hands through their facsimiles, as they are created, stewarded, and reproduced. Molds are made of Whitman’s hand; these molds are cast in plaster; these casts are collected, inherited, and finally donated to Harvard; just shy of a century later, the casts are transformed into data sets through 2D and 3D scanning and openly disseminated. In this passage, Walt Whitman’s Victorian hands both persist and change as sculptural process work, collectibles, and objects of memory and mourning.
Biography
Sarah Potvin (she/her) works as an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Texas A&M University. A former academic librarian, her research considers questions of public humanities, digital representation, humanities data, and scholarly communication under the umbrella of Digital Humanities. This abstract represents the public debut of new work on Walt Whitman that wanders through art history, media archaeology, histories of grief and mourning, and the digital afterlives of collection objects.
Berta Del Valle - Fidel Castro’s Hands: Sentiments and Affect as Sources of Political Legitimacy in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959-1976.
Abstract
A month ago, a working-class Cuban who, until recently, had devoted his life effort to supporting the revolutionary government and its ideals, discussed with me what he considered the essential problems of the current government to be: corruption, demagogy, and lack of transparency are high on his list. One thing, however, seemed to worry him especially, president Miguel Díaz-Canel’s serious incapacity to touch and connect with the people: “he is incapable of making them feel that which must be felt deep inside in order to convince and mobilize, he is not like Fidel.”
An examination of the Cuban political history show that, in the revolutionary-emotional community the expression of sentiments is indicative of morality, altruism, honesty, and legitimacy. This paper proposes looking at Fidel Castro’s hands as a key component of his charisma. Alongside the content of his political message, his embodiment of emotions and his expression of sentiments, often aided by the use of hands, greatly contributed to his political power and legitimacy across different sectors of the Cuban population. With the use of historical photographs, video recordings, and iconography depicting Castro’s hands, this work aims to show their key role in: 1. his emotional expression during political speeches and personal communication, and 2. his demonstrations of affect, love, and intimacy towards ordinary Cubans. In a local community hungry for politicians who appeared humble and sincere, Castro’s hands were a medium for achieving a form of public expression of emotions and affect that contributed to his prestige as a righteous leader.
Biography
Bertha del Valle Díaz is a predoctoral researcher and Ph.D. student at the Barcelona Autonomous University, writing about a local-emotional community as a major cause of the 1959 Revolution. In the same vein, her thesis aims to use cultural, political, and oral sources to show how politics and the economy were in a constant interrelationship with emotions and experience in the socialist Cuban society (1959-2000). She has received scholarships and grants, including the Catalonian grant FI_SDUR 2023, to support her academic work in Boston, Barcelona, and Havana.
Panel D: Practice Based Research
Janine Goldsworthy - Between Hands and Pixels: Unlearning Touch through Maternal Making.
Abstract
A chubby hand kneads at my chest while I hold her, my other hand cradles a phone. The frame shakes, then stills. This paper brings a research-creation perspective to what touch could be if we surrender the assumption we already know. I centre holding as a key touch facet: durational, reciprocal, materially legible. Through hyper-attentive maternal making: tracing, one-handed filming, slow editing, sculptural handling of digital materials, I foreground the messy, embodied labour of mothering, at once sustaining and fraught, as a carrier of tactile knowledges. These practices suggest how holding might be re-imagined across distance. Read through Donna Haraway’s Sympoiesis, Laura Marks’s haptic visuality, Erin Manning’s choreography of attention, and Susan Kozel’s somaesthetic, this PhD research project reclaims the hand as an archival touch point, where paper vellum, lacquer, camera, baby, and code compose knowledge together. This connects Victorian legacies of craft with contemporary debates about mediated intimacy, attention economies, and care. I will show fragments from video works ‘Baby Blue Hands’ and ‘Drip’, housed in a tended digital garden, a conceptual vessel of my methodology in motion (yet to be made public). Together, these works argue that art practice can surface new senses of digital touch, rooted not in generic gestures but in holding reciprocal, durational, textured, and tender.
Biography
Janine Goldsworthy is an artist, researcher, and PhD candidate at Central Saint Martins, UAL. She explores digital touch, tactility and maternal making in her project Between Hands and Pixels: Maternal Making for Tender Digital Holding. She is an experienced educator who has taught across BTEC, undergraduate and MA programmes, and has held international teaching and research roles in China and the UK. She is co-founder of rednile Projects and Ny Space, curating residencies and public programmes. Her multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, performance, video and code, focusing on feminist, process-led approaches to intimacy, care and material entanglement.
Fiona Snow - The Thinking Hand: Embodied Learning in Art, Craft and Design Pedagogy.
Abstract
In the studio spaces of higher education, both students' and lecturers' hands become sites of knowledge production that resist traditional academic approaches. This presentation explores how "thinking hands" navigate the complex terrain between embodied understanding and institutional evaluation in art, craft, and design education.
Drawing on qualitative observations from studio practice and miniature-making pedagogy, this research examines moments when students encounter what I term "indescribable skills" - knowledge that emerges through manual engagement with materials and tools but cannot be easily articulated or measured. Through narrative exploration, I demonstrate how hands (of both student and instructor) become mediators between thinking and making, active in instruction, learning, and assessment processes.
The presentation draws on Heidegger's aphoristic command to "let learn" and analysis of his pedagogical approach in "The Thing" to frame three key pedagogical moments: the student's search for tacit knowledge through material manipulation; the productive silence of studio learning where hands communicate what words cannot; and the challenge of assessing embodied knowledge within institutional frameworks that privilege verbal articulation.
Supporting students who learn through their hands requires rigorous pedagogical frameworks and active mentorship—moving beyond assumptions that "they learn by making" to develop structured approaches that honour both embodied knowledge and disciplined instruction. This work contributes to current discussions about embodied pedagogy by positioning the hand as both instrument and site of critical thinking. In connecting to the long heritage of human hand-thought development, this paper recognises art and craft studios as spaces that maintain historical practices where manual engagement remains fundamental to intellectual development.
Biography
Fiona Snow is a studio-based lecturer and researcher of Art & Design education in the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland. Her research interests centre on learning and teaching in creative arts studios, with a particular interest in the "knowing hand" and the essential role it plays in studio-based learning. She is currently pursuing a Doctorate of Education at Trinity College Dublin, focusing on creative arts pedagogies and embodied learning. Her sculptural work manifests largely in paper and wood and has been commissioned by the President of Ireland and for inclusion in Ireland's national archive in the National Museum of Decorative Arts.
Elise Maynard - The Hand as Temporal Bridge: Cross-Modal Translation Through Practice-Based Research.
Abstract
The hand serves as a unique conduit for cross-temporal and cross-modal translation, enabling contemporary makers to reach across centuries and reconnect with vocational ancestors through embodied practice. This paper explores how the hand's capacity for tactile memory and skilled manipulation allows us to access historical knowledge that exists beyond textual records, using pattern draping on a c.1880 dressmaker's dummy as a case study.
When draping fabric on this Parisian mannequin to recreate an 1880 bodice from Journal des Dames Et Des Demoiselles, my hands encountered the same material challenges faced by Victorian dressmakers: navigating fabric tension, feeling darts into place, and manipulating cloth around the exaggerated silhouette of the corseted body. This tactile dialogue revealed "hidden dimensions" of historical making that written patterns and fashion plates alone cannot convey. The hand's ability to sense fabric weight, grain direction, and structural necessity created a phenomenological link between makers separated by 145 years.
Drawing on scholars such as Toni Bates and Hilary Davidson, the process of experimental translation allows scholars to connect through practice-based research, where the hand becomes an instrument of temporal translation, converting visual information from historical fashion plates into three-dimensional reality. The pin marks scattered across the dummy's original cover, evidence of countless Victorian hands at work, guided contemporary hands in understanding decorative placement and structural anchoring. This cross-modal translation from image to textile, from past to present, demonstrates how skilled hands carry forward embodied knowledge across generations. These tactile constants create bridges of understanding that transcend historical distance, allowing contemporary practitioners to literally feel their way into past lives and working methods. The hand thus emerges not merely as a tool for making, but as a means of historical empathy and vocational continuity.
Biography
Elise Maynard MSc, BA (Hons) is a costume historian and PhD candidate at the University of Bristol. Her current research focuses on the ballet design work of Julia Trevelyan Oman. With a background in professional costume making, she incorporates practical techniques into her research, using material culture to deepen the understanding of historical design practices. Her work explores the intersections of performance, design, and cultural history, with a focus on how design choices can shape the cultural significance and impact of major productions. She is particularly interested in the role of nostalgia in costume design and its influence on audience perception.
Panel E: Hands and Healthcare
Daniel Grey - Out of Touch? Life and Death in the Hands of Midwives in England, 1871-1914.
Abstract
For much of the nineteenth century, midwifery as a profession was in very real danger of annihilation, even though the overwhelming majority of working-class mothers relied on midwives during childbirth. Florence Nightingale wrote in 1871 of the importance of good training for midwives and their intrinsic professional value. Yet despite campaigns to improve training from within as well as outside the profession since the 1880s, and national registration of midwifery through the Midwives Act 1902 and formation of the Central Midwives’ Board, the role remained controversial in many respects. Repeatedly, this focused on the idea the Victorian midwife’s hands might kill as well as heal – either through ignorance, or deliberately. Rumours persisted that unscrupulous midwives might offer abortion or even outright infanticide for hire, despite the evidence for this being limited at best. In the Report of the Departmental Committee on the Midwives’ Act, 1909, the Medical Officer of Health for Rotherham, Dr. Alfred Robinson, argued ‘I do not think that “churchyard luck” is a myth. I believe that it is a perfectly true fact, and that some people employ these women [so-called ‘handywomen’ without a formal midwifery certificate] because they think that the children will not live.’ While the 1909 Committee did not believe that parents were likely to collude with either trained or untrained midwives to kill their newborns, instead suggesting the popularity of the handywoman was down to her ‘uncleanly [sic] and inexpert …[but] companionable’ nature, they nevertheless acknowledged it as a potential problem. Even more widespread was a belief that ‘unqualified’ midwives were a lethal source of puerperal fever, liable to kill mothers and babies with a touch through unwittingly spreading contagion. This paper focuses on these competing representations of midwives’ hands during a period of rapid professional changes, especially debates over gender roles and skill.
Biography
Daniel JR Grey is Reader in Modern History and Programme Leader for the BA Sociology at the University of Hertfordshire. He has published several essays and articles on the intersections between gender, law and medicine in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain and India, especially focusing on crimes of violence such as infanticide.
Louise Bell - “It’s always been a good fitting leg because I made do myself:” Adapting prostheses in the aftermath of two world wars.
Abstract
Around 41,000 men returned to Britain after the First World War missing one or more limbs. The figure for the Second World War, however, was significantly lower at 12,000. This was something that the British State had to attempt to deal with and limb fitting centres were set up nationally to help these men with the fitting of new prostheses and the rehabilitation involved.
Exploring the tinkering and repairing that ex-servicemen undertook to their prostheses highlights a different narrative from the usual wearing a limb versus choosing not to wear a limb. These stories are important; however, they typically centre around how useful the prosthesis was deemed to be by the user. Many men did not undergo initial training in how to use their new limbs, and this often resulted in some ex-servicemen being reluctant to use them, because they did not have knowledge of just what they could potentially achieve with their new arms, for example. Exploring how these ex-servicemen used their own skills and embodied knowledge offers a different insight into this lived experience. Some men persevered with wearing their artificial limbs until that relationship collapsed and they decided against wearing them, or no longer deemed it necessary.
However, some men adapted their limbs themselves and made them more useful and comfortable for their own needs. Exploring these embodied relationships and the tinkering that these ex-servicemen undertook opens up an under-explored avenue in regards to disability and the First and Second World Wars. It is insightful to see this relationship between the user and the technology provided by the State being changed in the same way that these men were changing their artificial limbs. This paper will explore these ideas through examples from oral histories and material culture that show these men’s own touches to their prostheses and the hand they played in shaping their own post-war lives.
Biography
Louise is an early career researcher. She completed her PhD in 2025 at the University of Leeds, working collaboratively with The National Archives. Her thesis, and continuing research, explores limbless ex-servicemen in Britain and the two world wars, and the care and prostheses that were provided to them by the State. Louise is also a PGR rep for the Social History Society and is one of the co-founders of the UK Disability History and Heritage Hub.
Doris Yohannan - Air Anatomy: The Hand as a Medium of Embodied Learning in Anatomical Education.
Abstract
For centuries, the teaching of anatomy has relied on the teacher’s hand – dissecting, pointing, and guiding learners through the three-dimensional human form. In contemporary contexts where cadaveric material may be restricted, new methods have emerged to preserve the spatial richness of this tradition. Air Anatomy is a hand gesture-based pedagogic approach refined by the speaker and uses the educator’s hands in free space to “model” anatomical structures, planes and relationships. Drawing on cognitive load and constructivist theories, it “carves” sequentially, structures in space with the teacher’s hands into a living, imaginative 3D construct.
This paper situates Air Anatomy within the long history of the hand as an instrument of care, craft and communication. By performing representations “in the air,” the teacher’s hands both evoke and reconfigure the embodied experience of anatomy learning, enabling students to “feel” form and orientation with or without physical specimens. Such gestural teaching bridges cognitive and affective domains: it not only conveys knowledge but also reassures, engages, inspires and connects students who may be anxious or excluded from traditional dissection rooms.
Through qualitative observations and student feedback, this paper explores how Air Anatomy is at a crossroad of art, science, learning and cognition. The potential of using gestures with VR/XR technology to suit the contemporary classroom is also discussed. The educator’s hands become a shared haptic interface between human body and medical imagination, democratizing access to complex spatial knowledge. In doing so, Air Anatomy exemplifies the enduring relevance of the hand – as symbol, medium and practice, in mediating between bodies, knowledge and professional identity in contemporary medical education.
Biography
Dr. Doris George Yohannan is currently a Lecturer in Anatomy at the University of Exeter Medical School. He has fifteen years’ experience of teaching Anatomy to medical students in India. With expertise in cadaveric and non-cadaveric teaching of anatomy, curriculum development and innovative pedagogy, he has integrated technology driven (stereoscopic visualization, virtual microscopy) and traditional (simple hand gestures for Anatomy teaching – termed as Air Anatomy) methods into his teaching. He has also developed a free YouTube channel “Air Anatomy,” where he expresses anatomy teaching through diverse methods including hand gestures and embodied demonstration for enhanced spatial learning in anatomy.
Panel F: Artists’ Hands
Rebecca Fortnum - A Gesture to Genius.
Abstract
This proposal discusses a series of hand sculptures made for Les Praticennes, an exhibition that explored work by women sculptors who met or worked for Auguste Rodin, exhibited at the Henry Moore Institute, UK in 2023. Rodin's relationship with women is well known and problematic. However, not only did he acknowledge Camille Claudel as an artist of genius, he also employed her and several other women in his studio. Their role as studio assistants or ‘praticiennes’ was not only to prepare his materials but also model some aspects of his work, in particular the hands and feet of famous sculptures, such as the Burghers of Calais. It is interesting therefore to see his works as a form of dispersed authorship that includes the ‘handy work’ of lesser known, and in some cases virtually unknown, women artists. Viewed in this way they bring into question traditional notions of gendered gesture and expression.
These hands can be used to tell of the experience of women working for a ‘master’ yet displaying their own mastery in the modelling of a hand. Finding ways to bring this uncredited labour to the fore incudes the remaking of a hand in dfferent materials and through different processes. 3D printing, where resin is sanded to resemble marble or plastic gessoed to look like plaster are placed alongside the complexities of a hand made porcelain slip mould to raise questions the notion of originality and labour. As women determined to make art against the odds, the artists I discuss have an extraordinary, and in most cases unpublished, life narrative and make an astonishing web of friendship, association and influence from across the globe.
The artists mentioned will include Sigrid Af Forselles (Finnish1860-1935), Jesse Lipscomb (English 1861-1952), Madeleine Jouvray (French 1862-1935), Camille Claudel (1French 864- 1943), Anna Golubkina (Russian 1864-1927), Otillie McLaren Wallace (Scottish 1875-1947) and Hilda Flodin (Finnish 1877- 1958).
Biography:
Rebecca Fortnum is an artist, writer and academic and is Professor of Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. In 2019 she was elected Visiting Research Fellow in Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford, where she developed her painting project, A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter published as a book by Slimvolume in 2020. In 2021–22 she was the Senior Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute, culminating in Les Praticiennes, a solo exhibition at the HMI that explored the lives and work of the women sculptors of the Paris Belle Époque. She is author of In their own words; Contemporary British Women Artists (Bloomsbury, 2007), and editor of On Not Knowing: How Artists think (co-edited with Elizabeth Fisher, Black Dog 2013) and A Companion to Contemporary Drawing (co-edited with Kelly Chorpening, Wiley Blackwell 2020).
Margarita Kamalyan - The Eloquent Hand in Arto Chakmakchyan's Art.
Abstract
The oeuvre of Canadian-Armenian sculptor Arto Chakmakchyan is distinguished by its modern and expressive language, exhibiting affinities with the works of Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti. The sculpture's semi-abstracted style endows it with symbolism, thereby embodying ideas that are closely correlated with Armenian history and Christianity, albeit not confined to these contexts. The hand plays an instrumental role in the construction of the plastic mage, either as an integral component of the composition or as a central subject. The non-mimetic representation foregrounds the outstretched hands as constituent elements of a symbolic cross. This 'human-cross' motif recurs throughout the artist's oeuvre (“Prayer,” 1995). It symbolizes a believer, and serves a metaphor for the rebirth of his nation, which was the first to adopt Christianity in 301 (“Rebirth”, 1984). The hands, extended upwards, visually translate the human spirit's yearning to ascend. They become fundamental to the “Pietà,” (2000) as well as the “Triumph” (1990) and “Freedom” (“Towards the Stars,” 1965). In the Hiroshima monument (1964), the hand inosculates into the head and neck of the witness of the inhumane tragedy as an index of support. Self-supporting gestures feature also his other sculptures (“Komitas,” 1965, 1966). The three-fingered hand is an ambivalent symbol of loss and unity, specifically denoting the loss of the native lands and desire for national unity (“Three fingers” maquette for the monument of the Armenian Genocide, 1965). The contiguity of hands expresses the same idea through the juxtaposition of the intertwined fingers and the shattered cement texture (“Hands”, 2001). While in Arto’s artistic oeuvre the hand is the metonym for voice, its absence, visually reinforced through tied knots, evinces a state of muted and amorphous voicelessness (“Condition 1”, “Condition 2”, 1990)
Biography
Margarita Kamalyan is a Senior Researcher and the scientific secretary at the Institute of Arts of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. She earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Yerevan State University Chair of History and Theory of Armenian Art. She holds a Ph.D. in Arts (2014). Kamalyan has authored numerous articles and participated in national and international conferences in Armenia, the UK (Nottingham, Edinburgh), Italy and Russia. Her interests include Armenian Fine Arts, particularly Armenian Diasporic art of the XX century.
Panel G: Virtuality and Touch Phenomenon
Gwendolyn Bolderink - ‘I want your hands on me’: how to be a sex object.
Abstract
‘I want your hands on me’, the late Sinéad O’Connor sings, ‘I want you to come and please me.’ Wanting to be touched, wanting to be an object: it seems to be a part of sexuality, whether we like it or not. But how can one safely be a sexual object if objectification is considered morally problematic?
In her famous analysis on objectification, feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum asks the same question. She thinks that sexuality involves some element of objectification, and that, perhaps, considering objectification as such as always morally problematic leaves us with a big problem: how can we still have sex? Nussbaum tries to save sexuality from damnation by arguing that there is such a thing as “benign objectification” (Nussbaum, 1995). How is benign objectification possible? For Nussbaum, the solution lies in context: between two people who care for each other, objectification can be a “wonderful” part of sexual life, because after the objectification takes place, one makes sure to take extra care of the other person (their subjectivity) afterwards. As feminist phenomenologist Ann Cahill has pointed out, this results in a ‘rather odd model of sexuality, one which calls for individuals to rather suddenly and temporarily lose their most precious of traits, only to regain it slowly after a sexual encounter.’ (Cahill, 2011: 27).
To understand how good objectification can exist, and how it differs from bad objectification, we need a different model. A phenomenology of touch, that can be found in Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, can help us out. The reversibility of touching and being touched creates a view on objecthood as constitutive to being a subject. It therewith shows us how one can be a sex object without running the risk of losing or harming one’s own subjectivity.
Biography
Gwendolyn Bolderink started her PhD project ‘A New View on Lust: Sexual Desire Beyond Objectification’ in June 2024 at the Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy of Leiden University in The Netherlands. In this project she analyses how we can reconceptualize sexual desire beyond the subject-object dichotomy in order to have a better foundation for a positive sexual ethics. She also works as a book critic and editor for the Dutch daily national newspaper de Volkskrant and as a journalist for a monthly magazine on ‘public philosophy’ Filosofie Magazine.
Ross Cameron - ‘My sense of touch is most delicate’: Touch, authority and (the limits of) tactile geographies in James Holman’s travel narratives, 1820s-1840s.
Abstract
After losing his vision at the age of twenty-five, James Holman, the self-styled ‘blind traveller’, embarked on a series of journeys around the world, recounted in best-selling travel narratives published between the 1820s and 1840s. Despite this popularity, Holman attracted the ire of critics who doubted the authenticity of his travels, as how could he be ‘relied upon’ to write an accurate account of travel without ‘ocular evidence’? These criticisms are unsurprising: occularcentrism has pervaded travel writing since the eighteenth century and critics have theorised visuality as central to the genre through ‘imperial eyes’ and ‘the tourist gaze’.
This paper argues that Holman upset the sensory hierarchies of travel writing by using touch to gather information about places he visited. Holman believed that his tactile methods of observation ‘impelled a more close and searching examination than the superficial view’ of sighted travellers, whether through his ability to scale mountains without vertigo or circumvention of gendered norms in his interactions with women. This paper proposes that Holman’s narratives demonstrate the potential of travelogues to express tactile geographies and raise questions about how tactile engagement with, and representation of, space changes how readers interpret narratives. It also emphasises the limits of tactile geographies. When rendered into text, Holman often relied upon visual language, attributable to his desire to be considered an authoritative traveller rather than a curiosity and his struggles in describing elusive touch-based sensations.
Biography
Ross Cameron is a Public Engagement Fellow based at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. He is a part of the AHRC funded Victorian Hand: Emotions, Embodiment and Identity project (2024-28). Ross completed his AHRC funded PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2024 which examined how British depictions of southeastern Europe in travel writing evolved in dialogue with modernistic domestic change. Ross’s research can be found in Studies in Travel Writing, European History Quarterly, International History Review and Journal of Tourism History. He was the co-organiser of the 2023 edition of Borders and Crossings at the University of Łódź.
Weerada Muangsook - The Hand in Motion: The Performative Gesture of Page-turning in the Consumption of Jet Age Fashion Media.
Abstract
My paper examines how the hand gesture of page-turning shaped the experiential dimension of fashion media consumption in the 1960s. Specifically, I focus on a genre of photographic representation I term ‘jet age fashionscape’. These are images of fashion and travel staged in foreign, often non-Western and non-metropolitan settings, which appeared in the editorial features of American fashion magazines beginning in 1958 as facilitated by the advent of commercial jet. These editorials were not designed to appeal to vision alone but to operate along multiple axes, with vision and touch coming together in motion to create impressions ‘on the move’, reflecting broader cultural investments in travel, mobility, and the performance of cosmopolitan identities in the jet age. Demonstrating a heightened awareness of the material and kinetic possibilities of magazine photographs, the editorial design worked in tandem with the act of handling such that narration is activated and unfolds through the performative gesture of page-turning. How the reader’s hand moves along the page, how the pages are lifted and turned, and the sequence with which the contents are uncovered or remain hidden, are all considered in the planning and realisation of the photo stories. By conceptualising page-turning as a performative act that is necessary for the reception of 1960s fashion media, I foreground the hand’s role in activating the third and fourth dimensions of consumption.
Biography
Weerada Muangsook is a PhD student in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, where she is writing a dissertation on fashion photography from the jet age. More broadly, her research and teaching lies at the intersection of dress and fashion histories, its representation in visual culture, and the interrelated ideas of identity and power. Alongside academic work, she is a regular contributor to Fashion & Market, an online platform spotlighting practices in the Southeast Asian fashion community.
Panel H: Victorian Makers
Lena Ferriday - Touching Skill: The Place of the Hand in Rural Labour, 1840-1910.
Abstract
Human hands have been a crucial somatic instrument in labour and craft across past centuries, shaping, extracting from and packaging the material world around us. This paper asks how historians might study the development of the skills that underpin this labour, suggesting that by paying closer attention to the physical environment might allow us to unpick the processes by which individuals have refined their hand(i)craft. I will do so by focusing on the countryside of South-West England, exploring the many in which individuals used their hands to undertake manual labour and develop tactile expertise.
Traversing the dextrous, mobile hands of fishermen, miners, scientific researchers and country tour guides, I will expose the granularity of their hands’ encounters with the material environment. I will look at hands’ meetings with rocks, ore, water, and the skins and scales of non-human animals. I will also examine the tools and technologies that their hands collaborated with, which became extensions of and prostheses to their hands.
This case-study advances two central claims: first, that close attention to moments of tactile encounter between the hand and the physical world offers substantial insight into the processes by which labouring skills were produced; second, that these tactile skills were foundational to many ways of knowing the environment that developed in rural Britain in the nineteenth century. Thus, I articulate the intersections of histories of the hand and environmental history, contending that significant gains might be made by historians considering the two together.
Biography
Lena Ferriday is Lecturer in the History of Science and the Environment at King’s College London, where she researches and teaches histories of bodily experience in modern urban and rural Britain. She is producing a monograph on embodiment, travel and work in Britain’s rural fringes, and has recently published an embodied history of mining with Environment and History.
Róisín Quinn-Lautrefin - Victorian women’s domestic crafts and the hands that made them.
Abstract
The social and economic context of the nineteenth century set the stage for the spectacular expansion of amateur decorative crafts collectively known as fancywork. Alongside the traditional sewing and embroidery, new crafts developed: Berlin wool-work, scrapbooking, shell work and even taxidermy were popular among middle-class women. This presentation sets out to uncover the reasons behind the massive popularisation of handicrafts at a time of rapidly encroaching modernisation. I would like, in particular, to challenge the conventional opposition between the handmade and the factory-made.
While handicrafts might be expected to have receded under the influence of mechanisation and a growing culture of consumerism, in fact the opposite happened. The mass-production and rapid circulation of craft materials and haberdashery goods, alongside the ever-growing number of advice manuals and periodicals directed at women, meant that decorative crafting was cheaper and more accessible than ever before. No longer an elite activity for the leisured few, fancywork was undertaken by women across the social spectrum and became intimately connected with femininity and the ideology of domesticity.
Touch was central to women’s handicrafts, and both textile and non-textile crafts utilised materials with strong tactile associations: thread, wool, feathers, shells and hair, among others. Making objects, then, was an intrinsically embodied process and its popularity, at a time where a disconnection from the materiality of the natural world was increasingly felt, is no surprise.
The hands of Victorian women, in this context, acted as a microcosm of the industrial production carried out in factories but were also perceived as a desperate plea for material authenticity at a time of relentless transformation.
Biography
Róisín Quinn-Lautrefin gained her PhD, entitled “Through the ‘I’ of a Needle”: Needlework and Female Subjectivity in Victorian Literature and Culture from the University of Paris Diderot in 2016. She teaches English language and literature to undergraduate students in Paris. Her research interests include gender, needlework, handicrafts and marginalised forms of discourse.
Panel I: Hands on Workshop
Rebecca Whiteley - Make Your Own Obstetric Pocket Phantom.
Abstract
In 1891, the obstetrician Shibata Kōichi published Geburtshülfliche Taschen-Phantome, or Obstetric Pocket-Phantom, two articulated paper models of the fetus, along with a pelvis through which to pass them, and a compact pamphlet giving instruction on midwifery. The work met with moderate success and circulated globally, seeing multiple editions in German, English and Japanese. The models were intended to help medical and midwifery students to understand fetal presentation, and how the fetus could be manipulated and delivered in a variety of cases. They supplemented teaching in the lecture theatre, the clinic, and with three-dimensional and life-sized obstetric models. But how could small, flat, paper models do this? Could they teach the haptic skills required of the midwife? Or did they have other functions? Were modes of creative, comic or care-giving play scripted into these objects?
This hands-on workshop will encourage participants to think about these questions through the method of historic reconstruction. After a brief introduction to the models and their context, each participant will cut out and assemble their own obstetric model. In doing so, they will follow in the footsteps of Shibata, his publishers, and the contemporary users who handled and even made their own copies of the models. During the session, I will move around the space, assist people with their models and guide conversation.
This workshop allows participants to stand in the place of midwives of the late nineteenth century, to consider the handwork of learning, teaching and practicing, as well as the wider affective lives of medical objects. These technical models are, when all is said and done, baby dolls, and this workshop encourages broad and creative thinking about the ways that medical education and practice blended with wider and non-medical cultures of childbirth and infant care.
Biography
Dr Rebecca Whiteley is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham. Her research resides in the intersections of visual and material cultures, and medical and social history. She is particularly interested in printed images, books, and medical models. Her first book, Birth Figures, examines the many lives of early modern midwifery illustrations. She is currently researching the intersections of sex and medicine in mid-nineteenth century Britain, through a study of print culture, from medical illustrations, to satirical prints, to pornography.
Panel J: Hands on Workshop
Michelle Baruch-Baron - Using haptic experiences from the Clay Field to explore the potential of somatic healing.
Abstract
Attachment and complex trauma implicitly inform our relationship/s with the world. We reach out through motor impulses and receive sensory feedback from such encounters. Adults and children explore these haptic learning experiences in their search for fulfilment at the Clay Field.
The Clay Field (or sensorimotor touch therapy) has emerged over five decades of research and from the results of clinical evidence. It has been shown to foster the development of new neurological pathways that can bypass traumatic memories to restore wholeness and wellbeing. Using this sensorimotor, body-focused, trauma-informed art therapy approach, participants are offered the potential to repair past rupture through following the impulses of their hands (haptic perception). The process is not concerned with image-making but supports the awareness of body memories which resonates into the body’s sensory motor feedback loop. There is no specific problem or crisis that becomes the focal point but the option to explore and find new answers and solutions as they are embedded in the body's felt sense.
A box filled with clay, water and a sponge, provides the simple setting for discovering safe relationships, loving attachment and the fulfilment of vital needs.
The resistant clay provokes an instant feedback loop between physical interaction with the world at hand and its sensory resonance within the individual.
Workshop participants will be offered some water, clay, and a sponge, and guided through an experience of noticing how touch and felt sense can impact on the polyvagal system and how they can recognise their embodied experiences of this.
The workshop will provide opportunities for participants to reflect on their own relationships with the materials provided and the resonance (or not) of their experiences. They will be directed to some of the underlying theories and further reading to enhance any interest.
Biography
I am a Jewish, female, queer, working-class activist. As a registered Art Therapist and systemic practitioner, I work with individuals, looked-after-children, young people, families and carer/ child dyads. I trained in the use of sensorimotor art therapy tools and integrate these modalities within my practice. Understanding polyvagal and sensorimotor theories as a vehicle for healing has become a passion initiated from my life experiences. From years of being fascinated with Fatima’s hand door knockers and through my therapeutic practice, and work as a life model, my creative outlets now incorporate haptic resonance and exploration of the somatic body.
Panel K: Fashion
Nico Frederick - Quee(ring) the Hand: Coded Accessories, Lesbians, and Rings.
Abstract
The phrase ‘lesbian pinky ring’ is often used to denote the type of jewelry worn by sapphic individuals on their finger most notably in the mid twentieth century as a form of queer signaling, allowing recognition by other lesbians of possible community or partners.
Earlier this year, a ring created by jewelry designer Amy Spaulding spelling out the word ‘DYKE’ went viral on social media platforms when lesbian pop singer Reneé Rapp wore it to an event. This paper will explore the queer connotations of dressing the hand through the case study of lesbians and their rings, highlighting links between sapphic desire, coded accessories, and identity. Although historically rings have also had a sartorial connection to gay men, this paper will highlight the specific rebellion and meanings behind the lesbian ring as an extension of the hand of its wearer. Drawing on work by fellow lesbian fashion historian Eleanor Medhurst, field research done on lesbian-identifying figures primarily located in New York, and scholarship done in the fields of lesbian, gender, and queer studies alongside a gay semiotic framework of analysis, this interdisciplinary paper will seek to fill a gap in scholarship within the field of fashion studies. Little has been written academically in regard to lesbians and their rings despite the ample historical evidence of such figures wearing them and contemporary examples that build off of this queer sartorial history. This paper, therefore, will attempt to highlight not only the historical origins of these accessories but the varied meanings displayed when they are collected, made, and most importantly, worn.
Biography
Nico Frederick (they/them) is an independent researcher and dress historian whose work explores the intersection between dress, gender, and identity. They have researched and spoken at numerous events and conferences highlighting lesbian fashion history, including their recent work on costuming the lesbian vampire in film. They are a recent graduate of the Fashion and Textile Studies MA program from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York where their thesis explored representations of cross-dressing in the 1960s.
Lauren Bell - Covered in Flesh: Fashion, Eroticism, and Music Video Aesthetics.
Abstract
The body itself can function as a site of dress, where skin, gesture, and touch substitute for fabric, ornament, or silhouette. Hands, in particular, operate as coverings that protect, conceal, and accentuate the body much like clothing. When sliding across flesh, they perform as garments, cloaking, eroticizing, and shaping the body, suggesting that dress can emerge as much from human touch as from textiles. This paper examines how hands are deployed in music videos to obscure women’s bodies, especially breasts and genitalia, in ways that replace clothing while simultaneously evoking sexual intimacy. Music videos like Dev’s In the Dark (2011) and ADÉLA’s Sex on the Beat (2023) push this idea to the forefront, staging hands and bodily contact as forms of clothing that blur the boundary between exposure and concealment. The discussion also situates these examples within a broader conversation of sexualized performance in music videos, tracing influences from artists such as Madonna, Christina Aguilera, and Beyoncé. By placing these performances in dialogue with fashion theory and embodiment studies, this analysis examines how music videos render the body itself as a site of dress, where human contact functions as both fabric and performance.
Biography
Lauren Bell is a graduate student in the Fashion and Textile Studies Master's program at the Fashion Institute of Technology, specializing in decolonial theory within museums and fashion history. With two years of experience in higher education, Lauren has focused on event planning, social media management, and DEI initiatives. She’s the Chair of the Womxn’s Empowerment Conference committee at the FIT. She also serves as the Social Media Assistant for The Fashion and Race Database. Lauren’s primary professional goal is to democratize education and scholarship, ensuring they are accessible to a broader public.
Petra Egri - Embodying Heritage: The Hand, the Glove, and the Survival of Craft in Pécs.
Abstract
In the aftermath of the 2023 NFL Superbowl championship football game, the Hungarian media was ablaze with the news that the multi-platinum recording artist Rihanna wore a pair of “Pécsi gloves” as part of her Halftime Show performance ensemble. Using a combination of machine-based and manual techniques and tools—including a lifesize mold of the singer’s hands—the local Pécs, Hungary-based team at Karma Leather Gloves created a custom pair of gloves for an international superstar. In 1861, János Hamerli was granted official government permission to manufacture gloves, quickly making Pécs one of the most important glove-manufacturing cities in Europe. After World War II, the industry was nationalized under the newly-formed socialist government, breaking apart the large manufactories and placing them under administrative control, in effect providing the financial support and workforce needed to ensure the continuation of this manufacturing heritage/tradition through to the post-socialist period today. This paper explores the glove industry in Pécs as a rich case study in the layered entanglements of heritage, identity, labor, and craft. At the heart of this research lies the hand—not only as the tool that crafts, sews, and shapes—but as the very object that glove-makers must understand, replicate, and honor. Through visits and interviews with several Pécsi Gloves factory owners and workers—including Karma, Hamerli, and Gant—I will explore extant traditional, manual cut-and-sew manufacturing methods, and their relationship to modern and contemporary machine-based, and semi-machine-based techniques and tools, and how they’ve contributed to the industry’s positioning in local and international (glocal) spheres.
Biography
Petra Egri Ph.D, fashion theorist, is the head of the Department of Applied Arts at the University of Pécs, and a senior research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Arts, Research Institute of Art Theory and Methodology, where she leads the Hungarian Sartorial Heritage and Fashion Research Group. She is the main organizer of the Transcultural Fashion/Costume Narratives Conference (2025). Her award-winning book on radical fashion performance was published in 2023. Egri has published her research in journals such as Fashion Studies Journal, Vestoj, and BIAS, and served as a co-editor of three books about performances. Her study “Balmain x Barbie: A Fashion NFT Case Study” was published in the book Digital Fashion: Theory, Practice and Implications (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Panel L: Hands of Power
Kate West - Unruly Hands: Gestural Resistance and Metropolitan Carceral Power, c.1850-1900.
Abstract
The art historical and criminological scholarship on carceral power has developed along parallel but fragmented lines. In both art history and criminology, Foucauldian accounts of carceral power in Britian and Europe hollow out colonial racialization—that is, colonialism and the construction of race it affected—as well as resistance to it. Although anticolonial and decolonial criminologies foreground the role of colonial racialization in the construction of and resistance to carceral power, their attention is directed away from the metropole towards the colony.
Taken together, these literatures ignore or obscure how Metropolitan carceral power is shaped by and productive of colonial racialization and, more importantly, resisted. In this paper, using an archive of portrait photographs from a Victorian prison (c.1850–1900), I turn to the visibilizing and liberatory potentials of critical whiteness studies and anti-colonial and Black feminist theories to argue that Metropolitan carceral power could never subdue the agency of gesture held in the hand. Where the extant art-historical literature is empirically grounded in late-Victorian ‘mugshots’ and focuses on the head, I expand my temporal scope to include the early Victorian period and shift my focus to the hand. I show how the hands of white subjects were visualized through overlapping and uneven colonial visual codes associated with racial otherness and how, everywhere, they resisted these codes through gesture. Whether hands were placed on the sternum rather than the chest, held away from rather than against their body, or with fingers curled rather than splayed, individual gestures collectively represented the hand’s capacity to resist such codes. In so doing, and more broadly, the contribution of this research to the art-historical and criminological literatures is to foreground metropolitan carceral power’s relationship with colonialism, the racialization of whiteness it attempted to affect and its inherently partial character by centering what might be described as ‘gestural resistance’ to it.
Biography
Kate West is Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at King’s College London. Her research sits at the intersection of criminology and art history. She is finalizing her first monograph, which reframes Lombrosian criminology through art historical theory. The book shows that photography neither replaced nor displaced the visual arts therein; painting and sculpture coexisted alongside it as diagnostic tools, while artists themselves emerged as epistemic authorities. In this way, she argues, criminologists were practicing as art historians. Her broader research interests relate to the visual-cultural construction of the criminal body, and the ethics of criminological spectatorship.
Rachael Haslam - ‘Giving his Faith in his Hands’: The Hand and Embodied Trust in Late Medieval Church Court Disputes.
Abstract
This paper will explore the connection between the hand and embodied trust in late-medieval disputes from the dioceses of York and London. Linguistic analysis of late-medieval church court witness testimonies from these dioceses reveals that the Latin words manus (hands) and fides (trust), are frequent collocates. In this paper, I will consider the presence of trust language in relation to the language of hands found in these ecclesiastical court records. I will examine accounts of oath-taking in witnessing and considers cases that came to court due to a broken oath. The paper argues that oaths in this context, frequently connected to the act of handfasting and described with reference to the hands, are examples of embodied trust, both as speech acts representing a commitment to further action and as a performance, demonstrating commitment to the truth in court. For instance, in a 1491 case from the London Consistory Court, all the witnesses claim they saw the defendant making an oath by ‘giving his faith in his hands’. This paper will consider these cases alongside other examples to explore the connection between the hand and embodied trust in the late Middle Ages.
Biography
Rachael Haslam is a History PhD student at the University of York, AHRC funded through The White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities. Her PhD project focuses on the dynamics of trust and distrust in Church Court disputes from the Late Medieval Dioceses of York and London.