Robyn Calvert

Mackintosh Research Fellow, The Glasgow School of Art

Dr Robyne Calvert is a Cultural Historian with research interests focused on the history of art, architecture and design in Britain. In her current role as the Mackintosh Research Fellow at Glasgow School of Art, she is charged with fostering innovative research projects arising from the Mackintosh Building restoration project. From this, she is writing a new history of the building to be published by Yale University Press in 2020. She is also a visiting lecturer in art history at the University of Glasgow, where she teaches and supervises students on the MLitt programmes in Technical Art History and Dress History.

While Dr Calvert moved to Scotland to research Glasgow Style art & design, her PhD research took a slightly different direction in focussing on the way artists dressed to express their creative identities. Inspired by Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s “floppy bow tie”, she studied nineteenth-century British artists and designers, including the Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes, to seek a clearer definition of Artistic Dress and how it was practiced. Her thesis “Fashioning the Artist: Artistic Dress in Victorian Britain, 1848-1900” (University of Glasgow 2012), for which she received a Pasold Fund PhD bursary, is currently being revised and expanded for publication.