Margot Finn – History, UCL
Professor Margot Finn’s research focuses on the intersections among social, cultural, legal, economic and colonial/imperial experience in modern Britain during the ‘very long’ nineteenth century. Her research work has explored the material manifestations of such intersections. Since September 2011, she has led a team of three other researchers (Dr Kate Smith, Dr Helen Clifford and Ms Ellen Filor) on a 3-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust entitled ‘The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857’. This project, which combines research by academic, museum-based, local and family historians, examines the flow into and significance of the ‘Oriental’ objects that furnished Georgian and Victorian country houses in England, Scotland and Wales. Alongside her emerging interest in material culture, Finn’s experience in developing research projects (‘The East India Company at Home’, ‘Colonial Possessions’, ‘The Spaces of the Past’) that progressed post-graduate and post-doctoral scholars makes her aptly suited to the demands of Principal Investigator on 100 Hours. As Founding Director of the Institute of Advanced Study, Finn used innovative programmes and fellowships to create an environment which significantly advanced interdisciplinary research at the University of Warwick. As such Finn is uniquely placed to advise and encourage the junior scholars that will learn from 100 Hours.
Simon Werrett – History of Science, UCL
Simon Werrett is an historian of science with an interest in the long-term historical relationships of the arts and sciences, in particular the ways domestic, artisanal, and industrial skills, techniques, and performances have shaped the development of the sciences. He is the author of Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010, and more than twenty articles on the history of science and the arts. Before joining the Department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL Werrett was an Associate Professor of the history of science and technology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also held visiting fellowships to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Centre for Research in Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in Cambridge University, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. Werrett’s current research relates directly to questions of material culture and history, exploring the stewardship of objects and materials in the physical sciences in the seventeenth to nineteenth century. This involves recovering a range of material techniques for adapting, re-using, repairing and recycling materials in laboratory settings, and assessing the significance of such practices for the development of modern science. Werrett has used interdisciplinary approaches to study this topic, particularly approaches from art history, anthropology, economic and social history, and the sociology of science.
Ludovic Coupaye – Anthropology, UCL
Ludovic Coupaye is Lecturer in Anthropology and Curator of UCL’s ethnography collections. UCL’s Anthropology department is the world’s leading centre for the study of Material Culture and Ludovic is editor of the Journal for Material Culture. Ludovic’s research is primarily concerned with the relationships between people and things through two related angles: techniques and arts and his research investigates knowledge, materials and skills, alongside rituals and aesthetics, in relation to social dynamics and the environment.
100 Hours 