Francesca Berry

I am an art historian and Associate Professor of History of Art. I joined the University of Birmingham in 2005 as Lecturer in History of Art having previously lectured at University of Warwick, Birkbeck, and University College London. I studied for my BA, MA and PhD History of Art in the Department of History of Art at University College London and then proceeded to an AHRC post-doctoral research fellowship in the Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior at the Royal College of Art, Royal Holloway, and Victoria & Albert Museum. Between 2013 and 2016 I was Head of the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at University of Birmingham and took this role up again in 2017-18. I have been an Editor of the Oxford Art Journal, published by Oxford University Press, since 2010 and was Chair of its editorial group from 2017 to 2022. From 2022 to 2025 I was Head of Research for the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music.

My research is analytically and inclusively feminist, object-based, intermedial and interdisciplinary. I interrogate and produce published and curated social histories of art and art making in France during the period 1848 to 1940 through the disciplinarily marginalised intepretational categories of women, femininity and domesticity. I am recognised as a world-leading expert on modern visual cultures of domesticity, including mass-mediated domesticities produced by magazines, advertising and consumer exhibitions. Equally, I am recognised as a world-leading expert on the art and practices of Edouard Vuillard, the Nabis, and related Parisian avant-garde formations circa 1900. Recently, I have started a new major research project on the Paris art worlds made and unmade by migrant women art workers 1900-1940 and, relatedly, a book project on the Parisian studio domesticities of migrant women art workers in the period.

My monograph, Edouard Vuillard, the Nabis, and the Politics of Domesticity was published January 2025 by Bloomsbury Academic/Bloomsbury Visual Arts in the Material Culture of Art and Design series. It is the first book-length feminist engagement with Vuillard and Intimisme. In it I overcome the structural repression of domesticity, femininity and women's creative agency in histories of male artists' avant-garde practice.

I was guest curator to the international loan exhibition ‘Maman: Vuillard and Madame Vuillard’ at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, October 2018 to January 2019. With Mathias Chivot of the Archives Vuillard, Paris, I was co-author of the exhibition’s fully-illustrated catalogue, Maman: Vuillard and Madame Vuillard, published 2018 by Paul Holberton Publishing. I have made contributions to several other exhibition catalogues including ones published in France, Italy, and the US.

I have co-edited two journal special issues: 'Feminist Domesticities', published 2017 as a special issue of Oxford Art Journal; and 'Publishing the Modern Home', published 2005 as a special issue of Journal of Design History. Currently, I am co-editing with Dr Rachel Coombes (University of Cambridge) a special issue of Dix-Neuf journal on the subject of 'Nabi Intermediality', for expected publication in 2027.

I am in the process of building two research projects: 'Marginal or Integral? The Paris Art Worlds Made and Unmade by Migrant Women Art Workers 1900-1940' and ‘Nabi Politics: Art at the Vanguard of Debate after 1888’. 

I have been researcher on four RCUK funded collaborative research projects: as co-investigator to AHRC Suburban Birmingham: Spaces and Places, 1880-1960 (University of Birmingham, Birmingham Museums Trust, Library of Birmingham, 2009-2012); to an AHRC Art History Research Network; and as postdoctoral research fellow at AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior (Royal College of Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2001-2003). I was Principal Investigator and lead supervisor to the successfully completed AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award ‘Displaying Childhood Spaces’.

BA History of Art (University College London)

MA History of Art (University College London)

PhD History of Art (University College London)