https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2235-489XDr Claire O’Mahony studied at the University of California at Berkeley and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Whilst researching her doctorate, she was Secondary Schools and Community Learning Officer at the Courtauld Gallery and a researcher for Richard Green Galleries and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. She was Director of Lifelong Learning in History of Art at the University of Bristol for six years before her appointment at the University of Oxford in 2006. She curated Brunel and the Art of Invention at the Bristol City Art Gallery in 2006. Her academic service has included Director of Graduate Studies for Oxford Lifelong Learning, Admissions Tutor at Kellogg College, Associate Editor of the Journal of Design History, and Chair of the Design History Society. Her research interests coalesce around material culture, place-making, and collective memory of autonomy within regional and borderland cultures especially in France and Scotland since 1870.
Dr Claire I R O’Mahony
Associate Professor in the History of Design
Course Director for the MSt in the History of Design
Fostering interdisciplinary learning to encourage fresh interpretation of historical material and spatial cultures is at the heart of Dr O’Mahony’s teaching. Encouraging students to explore how direct experience and physical analysis of things and places alongside close reading and interpretation of primary and archival texts and imagery to facilitate their independent historical research is the core of her pedagogic practice. Since 2009, she has supervised over 200 successful dissertations on the MSt in the History of Design. Three of her MSt students were awarded the annual Design History Society Essay Prize and many have secured small grants from learned societies supporting their dissertation research. A number of her MSt students have gone on to doctoral study including at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London (Presland), the University of Birmingham (Tso), Kingston University, London (Hare), and Oxford (Entwistle, Colakis, Godau). Two DPhil students have completed their thesis successfully with her supervision at Oxford: Emma Anderson ‘The Hotel de Luxe’: the architectural and social significance of the ‘grand hotel’ in London 1860-1910 (2019) and Minna Colakis Reinventing space and self: stories of habitation through the adaptation of the modern British military and religious material past (2025).
How and why regional identity and temporality are embodied in things and places in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the central focus of Dr O’Mahony’s research. Decorative and spatial practices are her core case studies including mural decoration, tapestry, interior design, exhibition displays, garden design, drystone walling, jewellery, costume, and stage design. The juxtaposition of historicist and modern narratives in the visualization of metropolitan, suburban, and rural identities in southern and eastern regions of Third Republic France has been a mainstay of her research. Comparative global analyses of the representation of craftworkers and the cultural history of furniture are new strands in her recent publications. Her next project focuses on how exhibitions at mid-century represented historical, modern, and futuristic narratives about Scotland.
View all of Dr Claire O’Mahony’s publications through her ORCID iD.
