Team
Shehnaz Suterwalla
Dr Shehnaz Suterwalla is a writer and critic who teaches at the RCA. She runs a specialist course on subcultures and convenes College-wide postcolonial reading groups. Her research uses material and visual culture, and literature, to explore the politics of the body, in particular embodied expressions of radical identity in terms of gender and race. She is also researching experimental methods through feminist writing about how to decolonise the curriculum and culture. Shehnaz is working on a new book about how women of colour perceive the future.
Sarah Cheang
Dr Sarah Cheang is Head of Programme on the History of Design programme at the RCA. Her research interests centre on transnational fashion, material culture and the body. She has a special interest in the role of Chinese material culture within histories of Western fashionable dress and domestic interiors, a subject on which she has published widely and lectures frequently. Her co-edited collection, Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion (2008), and continued research and publishing on hair, fashion and identity have also led to contributions to magazines, exhibition catalogues, festivals, radio and television.
Livia Rezende
Dr Livia Rezende has worked as a graphic designer while advancing academic research in design history for the last 16 years. She investigates histories of experimental pedagogies in design education as a strategy for current decolonial purposes. Her key publications investigate Latin American design histories from a global perspective, Brazilian design, and the commodification and gendering of raw materials in World’s Fairs. In 2019, she joined the Art & Design Faculty of the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is Visiting Lecturer at the RCA.
Katie Irani
Katie Irani is a Brighton-based design historian, completing a LAHP-funded PhD at the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum. Her research interests include materialities of the body, decoloniality, and otherwise methodologies in historical and artistic practice. She acts as Associate Lecturer in Cultural & Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion (UAL, London) and Administrator of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Frozen Futures’.
Elena Jarmoskaite
Elena Jarmoskaite is a graduate of the V&A/RCA History of Design MA programme and professional Graphic Designer. Her research focuses on the history of science, medicine, and the spread of misinformation through visual media.
Hang Li
Hang Li is a curator based in London. She has been looking at web-based curation by intersecting internet study, computation and the performativity of born-digital art practices. Having studied the curatorial and architectural design, as well as parametric design based on particle simulation and robotic fabrication, Hang is interested in the curatorial role and process, in presenting, communicating and mediating contemporary art in the sociocultural and technical context of the web.