Professor Sandra Kemp
Director, The Ruskin – Museum and Research Centre, ProfessorProfile
Professor Sandra Kemp became Director of The Ruskin - Library, Museum and Research Centre in October 2017. She is an academic and curator who has worked at prestigious institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, including the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.
Kemp led the successful fund-raising campaign to secure The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection for Lancaster University, and in 2019 – the bicentenary year of John Ruskin’s birth – relaunched The Ruskin as an integrated university museum, archive and research centre. The ‘landmark acquisition’ (Art Fund) was the largest grant awarded in 2019 by the National Heritage Memorial Fund, leveraged on Kemp’s vision for The Ruskin as one of the world’s leading University Museums, that encourages us all to look closely, see clearly and imagine freely through Ruskin's works.
Her exhibition Ruskin: Museum of the Near Future explored Ruskin’s intense processes of visual observation through works rooted in the particularities of the natural world. Commissions by contemporary artists, testifying to the relevance of Ruskin’s ideas today, were interspersed amongst Ruskin’s paintings and drawings, diagrams and models, books, daguerreotypes and woodcuts, manuscripts and letters. The exhibition was profiled in the Daily Mail and the Financial Times podcast ‘John Ruskin's message for our times’. A short film of Ruskin: Museum of the Near Future is on YouTube.
In 2021, The Ruskin announced its forthcoming season, Tomorrow’s World Today: Ruskin, Art and Science. The programme launched with the Google Arts and Culture exhibition Painting with Sunlight: Ruskin and Science, co-curated by Kemp in partnership with the Royal Society, introduced in the blog post Cloud Perspectives.
Research Interests
The Ruskin: Museum of the Near Future
My aspiration is to continue to be a leading innovator in cross-disciplinary and public-facing research. It is my belief that as inherently dynamic institutions, constantly reinterpreting the past in light of the present, museums are important sites for the development and exchange of object-orientated interdisciplinary knowledge and expertise, re-imagining as well as re-interpreting our understanding of individual and collective identity, and of how we see the world.
My research focusses on questions arising from museum practice:
- how we use collections to facilitate news ways of doing research and new ways of connecting people with heritage;
- the value of the past in the present and whether and how our understandings of the past may provide pathways to the future;
- visual aptitude and draughtsmanship as powerful conceptual tools and the importance of education in observation in all disciplines;
- how interdisciplinary and hybrid forms of knowledge are crucial in a world where the ways in which we make and communicate knowledge are rapidly changing.
The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection provides a unique perspective on the foundations of 20th and 21st century artistic, social and political developments and is of outstanding research interest on account of the range and importance of the materials it contains. As a future-orientated thinker who was deeply committed to social and cultural values, Ruskin’s writings on European visual arts, well-being, conservation, political economy and social welfare spoke powerfully to the 19th century, but were prescient for our own. The collection provides the ideal locus for collaborative cross campus and cross disciplinary research. This will be the focus of the new Lancaster University Ruskin Research Centre for Culture, Landscape and the Environment.
Career Details
As an academic and curator, I have worked at the Universities of Oxford, Southampton and Glasgow, the Royal College of Art, the V&A, the Science Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, as well as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. My exhibition, Future Face: Image, Identity, Innovation, funded by the Wellcome Trust at the London Science Museum, explored the long intellectual union of the art, design, technology and science in the analysis of the face as a 3-D bar-code of identity, and explored what faces might be like in the future. At the V&A I co-ordinated V&A research in partnership with the Bard Graduate Center, New York, for an exhibition and related publications on John Lockwood Kipling and the international legacy of arts and craftsand led collaborative research on the historical role of museums in the imagination of the future, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
My background is in English Literature, with a D.Phil from Oxford University, with research specialisms in 19th century literature, including literary and feminist theory, and training as a curator. For the past fifteen years my work has been located within the disciplines of futures studies in relation to visual and material cultures, both the historical dynamics behind the development of futures knowledge and current methods of futures expertise. I have extensive publications, including Kipling’s Hidden Narratives (Blackwell), the OUP Reader in Feminisms with Judith Squires, the Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction with Charlotte Mitchell and David Trotter; Writings on Writing with Lisa Lewis(Cambridge University Press), Italian Feminist Thought with Paola Bono(Blackwell) and Future Face: Image, Identity and Innovation (Profile Books).
I am an experienced leader of academic, public and corporate programmes with a successful international track record of delivery of major collaborative research projects and exhibitions. I have initiated and led public engagement and visitor events at the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, and SciFest Africa; and have secured EPSRC and the Nuffield Foundation funding for major public engagement programmes, working in association with biomedical scientists, medical physicists, surgeons, sculptors, filmmakers, painters and photographers.
External Roles
My Visiting Professorship at Imperial College follows my four year Senior Research Investigator role in the ICL Department of Materials at Imperial College, and my work as Royal College of Art (RCA) Research Director from 2000-2008 when I initiated research staff and student collaborations across design, material science and computer science, in partnership with science-based industries, government agencies, and the creative and cultural industries.
I am a member of the international jury of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
Images of Italy
01/03/2024 → 02/11/2024
Research
Ruskin and the Colour of Science
01/01/2024 → …
Research
A Model Archive
01/01/2021 → 31/12/2021
Research
Blanket Technologies: Capturing Heritage Textile Techniques
01/08/2019 → 30/09/2021
Research
Transcultural Utopian Entanglements and the Future: India, Britain, and Beyond
01/06/2019 → 15/10/2019
Research
Augmented Humanity: Does the Human Enhance the Machine or the Machine Enhance the Human?
01/01/2019 → 31/10/2019
Research
Nuclear Cultural Heritage: From Knowledge to Practice
01/10/2018 → 31/10/2022
Research
Universal histories and universal museums: a transnational comparison
01/01/2018 → 31/01/2019
Research
Future Face: New Lexicons for Identity
01/12/2015 → …
Research
Universal Histories and Universal Museums: a transnational comparison
01/12/2015 → …
Research
Futures: Cross-Disciplinary Network
01/01/2014 → …
Research
John Lockwood Kipling: the international legacy of arts and crafts
01/01/2013 → 31/12/2017
Research
Showcasing the Future: Socialising Knowledge and Innovation
01/01/2013 → …
Research
Scenario. The Future of History: A Cultural Perspective
01/01/2012 → …
Research
Connecting Collections
01/01/1900 → …
Research
Revisioning Ruskin
01/01/1900 → …
Research
Ruskin and VR
01/01/1900 → …
Research
Ruskin's Gardens/ A Living Archive
01/01/1900 → …
Research
School of Ruskin and Conservation of Ruskin's Lecture Diagrams
01/01/1900 → …
Research
The Eye of the Mountain
01/01/1900 → …
Research
The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection (Explore, Newcastle)
Public Lecture/ Debate/Seminar
John Ruskin's Daguerreotypes (Explore, Newcastle)
Public Lecture/ Debate/Seminar
John Ruskin's Daguerreotype Photography
Invited talk
'Futures: Representational Practices'
Invited talk
Ruskin and Geology
Invited talk
The Silver Canvas: Daguerreotypes in The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection
Invited talk
Ruskin and Science
Invited talk
Futures: Methodologies
Invited talk
A Model Archive
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
John Ruskin: Prophet of the Anthropocene
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
‘John Ruskin 19th-century visionary: 21st-century inspiration’
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Celebrating Imperfection: John Ruskin and the Creative Arts in the 21st Century
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
John Ruskin, Science and the Environment
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Grappling with the Futures: Insights from Philosophy, History, and Science, Technology and Society
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Nuclear Cultural Heritage AHRC-funded Network (External organisation)
Member of Advisory Panel
Nuclear Cultural Heritage: Position statement, Thurso 2 September 2019
Expert Opinion
Nuclear Cultural Heritage: Final Report
Expert Opinion
Museum Universalities in Western Cultures Capitals in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
FutureDesignEd: Innovation in Design Education and Innovation in Education by Design
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Comparative Museologies: Case Studies from Asia
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Comparative Museologies
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
John Lockwood Kipling: Arts & Crafts in the Punjab and London
Festival/Exhibition/Concert
'The Evolution of the Museum'
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Universal Histories and Universal Museums Workshop
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Locating Creation
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Kipling's Lahore
Public Lecture/ Debate/Seminar
V&A Kipling Study Day
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Dialogue on Design, Exhibition and Research Impact
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
John Lockwood Kipling : Arts and Crafts in the Punjab and London
Festival/Exhibition/Concert
Past Matters, Research Futures
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Future Faces: New Lexicons for Identity
Invited talk
Universal histories and universal museums: a transnational comparison
Invited talk
Kipling in India: India in Kipling
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
John Lockwood Kipling Symposium
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
First International Conference on Anticipation
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
100 Years From Now
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Scenario. The Future of History: A Cultural Perspective
Public Lecture/ Debate/Seminar
Futures by Design: Thinking Forward Through the Past
Invited talk
A Unified Knowledge? Arts, Science and Technologies of Visualisation
Invited talk
Human Enhancement: Future Designs
Public Lecture/ Debate/Seminar
Future Face: Image, Identity, Innovation
Invited talk
Self-portraiture
Invited talk
Future Face
Festival/Exhibition/Concert
Future Face
Festival/Exhibition/Concert
Future Face
Festival/Exhibition/Concert
The Development of Studio-Based Research at the Royal College of Art
Invited talk
Photography’s Legacy: The Changing Face of Portraiture
Public Lecture/ Debate/Seminar
- Centre for War and Diplomacy