Project background
The University of Essex, in collaboration with the Warner Textile Archive (WTA) invites applications for a Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) studentship examining post-war British design through the life and legacy of Marianne Straub (1909 - 1994), one of the most influential textile designers of the twentieth century.
Through her work with Warner & Sons and other major British manufacturers, Straub sought to democratise access to good design, developing stylish, functional and affordable textiles for everyday use. Her iconic designs featured on the London Underground, London buses, airports, public interiors and homes. Despite her significant contribution to industry and culture, Straub’s work remains underexamined within academic scholarship. This project will reveal an as-yet untold story of the work of a migrant woman designer, a story that intersects with the major themes and debates in post-war British history, including: deindustrialisation and decline; social change; mass consumption and everyday life; gender and labour; national identity; and international power and prestige.
This studentship offers a unique opportunity to conduct original historical research with a nationally significant collection, including design, sample, and costing books, weave trials, small textile samples, power-woven textiles and corresponding rule papers, as well as the business records of Warner & Sons, correspondence and photographs connected to Straub, her designs and details of an exhibition held on her life and work in 1984. You’ll be trained to catalogue the Marianne Straub Collection currently under acquisition – containing her personal diaries and correspondence with other key figures important in the world of industrial design – creating a new combined collection that you will be the first researcher to access.
Project aims
This studentship addresses a gap in the history of design and industry, exploring how Straub’s work as a designer, innovator and educator shaped debates around design quality, industrial production and the creative economy after the Second World War. It will examine how her commitment to durable, stylish and affordable design reflected wider debates about industrial production, innovation and the creative economy, while highlighting the East of England’s important but often overlooked role in Britain’s textile manufacturing heritage. The project also engages with historical themes that resonate in the present day, including economic sustainability, innovation and intellectual property, industrial production and the impact of and responses to globalisation in the creative industries.
Through collaborative research, the project aims:
- To use the combined archival collections to recover and understand the impact of Marianne Straub on contemporary British textiles and ideas about everyday design through both her design and teaching work
- To re-examine and rethink prevailing historiographies of post-war British industry, including by assessing the national and international impact of the textile industry in the East of England
- To catalogue the newly acquired personal papers of Marianne Straub to a professional standard and use the insights gained to inform the primary research and make methodological contributions
- To unlock the unused archives and propose paths for future research in design, gender, social, labour and/or industrial history, intersecting with collaborative aims to secure new income streams for financial sustainability
Your research will be interwoven with professional and knowledge exchange activities to ensure your findings are translated into real-world impact. Alongside the cataloguing, you’ll be supported to undertake tasks such as producing a finding aid for the Marianne Straub Collection, writing updates for the WTA website and newsletters, giving talks to staff and volunteers and creating a case study that can be shared with other archives facing similar challenges.
Through these activities, you will play a central role in WTA realising objectives such as positioning itself as a nationally important resource for understanding Britain’s industrial heritage and creative economy and achieving Arts Council England Designated Status. This is all invaluable experience for careers beyond the CDA and we are open tailoring this aspect of the project to meet your future plans and goals.
Project opportunities
As part of the CDA, you’ll be trained to catalogue to a professional standard, cataloguing the 11 boxes of the Marianne Straub Collection, gaining invaluable insights into her ideas and working practices as well as ensuring that the papers are accessible for a range of audiences into the future. You’ll be embedded in the Archive team and involved in discussions that will shape WTA’s education and research strategy, helping to design student placements and opportunities, getting involved in public engagement activities and contributing to the museum exhibition programme. Through the collaboration with WTA, you will build professional contacts across the creative and cultural sectors, benefit from the Archive’s extensive regional and national networks and have the chance to shadow different roles within the Braintree District Museum Trust, which owns the Archive.
You will have access to the full range of professional development opportunities available to postgraduate research students through the University of Essex’s Proficio programme, which funds participation in internally and externally delivered training courses. This is enhanced by contributions from WTA. The Archive is offering match-funding of the £700 provided by the University towards conference attendance costs, giving you a total of £1400 to support your participation in a wide range of professional and academic conferences, networking and other events relevant to your research. WTA is also offering a travel bursary of up to £9,000 towards the costs of travel to WTA to allow you to work on-site one day per week for the duration of your PhD, where you’ll have a dedicated desk. There will also be a £500 book budget to purchase additional texts for the Archive’s reference library to support your research.
In addition to the training you’ll be given in cataloguing within the WTA team, there will be training in a range of core archival activities. Digitisation is among the most important, including taking images used for reference, assessing items for high-resolution photography and supporting the digital preservation of the collection. You will, if interested, be able to develop hands-on skills in the preventative and remedial conservation of the paper and fabric collections to support the long-term preservation of the Archive Collection.
There will also be training as relevant to the project and the public engagement activities in intellectual property rights, object handling, exhibition and interpretation and collections management to accreditation standards with The Collections Trust and Museums Development South East.
Collaborative Partner
The Warner Textile Archive, based in Braintree, is a nationally significant collection of British industrial textiles and holds the largest archive of an individual textile manufacturer in the public domain in the UK. As a publicly owned cultural institution under the umbrella of the Braintree District Museum Trust, it preserves the design legacy of Warner & Sons. The Archive holds over 100,000 administrative records, paper designs, trial samples, manufacturing equipment and textiles of Warner & Sons, their predecessors and successors, illustrating how furnishing textile manufacturing changed over more than 150 years.
As well as preserving historic designs, WTA is a ‘living archive’, licensing designs for contemporary manufacture. Designs from WTA have featured on a wide range of products including fabric, wallpaper, jewellery and stationery. All of the income generated supports the conservation of the Archive Collection and the Trust’s long-term sustainability.
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