University College Falmouth Course Leader makes her own news

Fiona Hackney, Course Leader on MA 20th Century Art & Design at University College Falmouth has contributed to a new book on Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940 edited by Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier and published by Palgrave Macmillan in November 2008. 

The book is a collection of extended essays that were presented at ‘Transatlantic Print Culture,’ a conference convened at the University of Delaware in 2007; Fiona’s paper formed the basis of ‘Women are News’: British Women’s magazines 1919-1939,’ chapter 7 in the book. 

Ann Ardis, Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of English at Delaware University and Patrick Collier, Associate Professor and Assistant Chair of English at Ball State University, organised the conference and have written the introduction to the book explaining how this collection of essays maps out the remarkable sea change that happened both in the UK and in America in literacy, print and visual design around the turn of the twentieth century. “

More newspapers, magazines and books were published annually than ever before and many of these were reaching wider – and different – groups of readers, as population growth and literacy rates soared in both countries,” Ardis and Collier explain.  Fiona has contributed essays on magazines, gender and domestic practice to a number of publications including The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Homedressmaking (Berg, 1999) and, more recently,

Use Your Hands for Happiness: Home Crafts and Make-do-and-Mend in British Women’s magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, appeared in the Journal of Design History. “My chapter explores the diverse representations of women in British women’s magazines  at a time when many struggled to be, in the words of journalist Margaret Lane, ‘wage earners and sweethearts,’ holding down a job and managing a home; a dilemma that remains unresolved today,” said Fiona.

“Exploring the complex and shifting inter-relationship between society and culture is central to the work we do on MA 20th Century Art & Design: Histories & Theories, and this essay contributes to that task.”

For further information about MA 20th Century Art & Design: Histories & Theories at University College Falmouth, visit www.falmouth.ac.uk/20centuryartdesign, email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 214360.