Dr Jane Tynan
Research Interests
Social history of fashion and clothing; gender and popular culture; history of uniform clothing: military and civilian; fashion and social identity; conflict and visual/material culture; art and design modernism; politics of design; gender and design; the body and war memory.
Current Research
My research primarily concerns the history and politics of design.
At the moment my work on military uniform explores embodied aspects of war and conflict. I have recently published on the military uniforms worn by the British army in the First World War: in particular the adoption of khaki as camouflage device, the experiences of conscientious objectors who resisted uniform and the role of the tailoring trade in wartime army clothing production. I am currently completing a book about the khaki service dress worn by British combatants on the western front; it considers how uniform embodied social class and ethnicity, the modes of its production and consumption, and its incorporation into the iconography of war remembrance. I have also published on the popular fascination with military themes in contemporary fashion design and media.
In the future I would like to explore the material culture and improvised uniforms created for guerilla warfare and insurgency. Social theory is another area of research interest, and I am contributing an essay to a forthcoming anthology Thinking through Fashion that considers the significance of Michel Foucault’s thought to the analysis of fashion as image, practice and discourse.
Recent Research
Book
2013: Khaki: British army uniform and the making of the First World War civilian soldier (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
Journal articles
- 2013: ‘Making and Remaking the Civilian Soldier: The World War I Photographs of Horace Nicholls’ co-authored with Suzannah Biernoff, Journal of War and Culture Studies, special issue: Men at War, 5.3, pp. 277-293 (in press).
- 2011: ‘Military Dress and Men’s Outdoor Leisurewear: Burberry’s Trench Coat in First World War Britain,’ in Journal of Design History, special issue on uniforms, (2011) vol. 24, issue 2, pp. 139-156.
- 2011: Book Review of Juliet Ash, ‘Dress Behind Bars: Prison Clothing as Criminality,’ London: IB Tauris, 2009, in Journal of Design History (2011) vol. 24, Issue 1, pp. 92-94.
- 2010: Exhibition Review of ‘War and the Body,’ in Media, War & Conflict (2010) vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 365-376.
- 2009: 'The Lure of Discipline: military aesthetics and the making of the First World War civilian soldier’ in Photography and Culture (2009) vol. 2, issue 2. pp.135-152.
- 2009: 'Creativity and Conflict: how theory and practice shapes student identities in design education’ in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education. Vol.8, no.3. pp. 295-308.
Exhibition catalogues
- 2011: ‘Knitting for Victory: military chic in fashion knitwear’ in Unravel: Knitwear in Fashion (Tielt: Lannoo Publishers, 2011) pp. 39- 45. Fashion Exhibition at ModeMuseum Provincie Antwerpen, MoMu, 2011, Belgium.
- 2008: 'Scoping the Enemy: military aesthetics and the artifice of war' in Blaise Smith Weapons, pp.48-50. Catalogue for art exhibition at Hunt Museum, Limerick (2008) and Kilkenny Arts Festival (2009), Ireland.
Book chapters
- 2012: “Quakers in Khaki:’ conscientious objectors’ resistance to uniform clothing in First World War Britain’ in Stephen Gibson and Simon Mollan (eds.) Representations of Peace and Conflict (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) pp. 86-102
- 2012: ‘Military Chic: fashioning civilian bodies for war’ in Kevin McSorley (ed.) War and the Body (London: Routledge) pp. 78-89
- 2011: ‘Regulating the Body in Army Manuals and Trade guides: the design of First World War khaki service dress’ in Grace Lees-Maffei (ed.) Writing Design: Words and Objects (Oxford: Berg) pp. 93-102.
- 2010: ‘Women in Fashion Design’ in O’ Connor, Karen (ed.) Gender and Women’s Leadership: A Reference Handbook (California: Sage). pp. 933-940.
- 2008: 'Tailoring in the Trenches: the making of First World War British army uniform' in Meyer, Jessica (ed.) British Popular Culture and the First World War (Leiden: Brill, 2008) pp.71-93.
Recent conference papers
- 2013: '"Legion of the excluded": the unmilitary appearance of the 1916 rebels', at Object Matters: Making 1916, Dublin, Ireland.
- 2011: ‘Conscientious objectors’ resistance to uniform clothing in First World War Britain’ at Design History Conference Design Activism and Social Change, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.
- 2010: ‘Khaki: army clothing and architectures of surveillance’ at Ordnance: War, Architecture and Space, University College Cork, Ireland.
- 2010: ‘Khaki: fashioning civilian bodies for war’ at War and the Body, Imperial War Museum, London, UK.
- 2009: ‘‘Tailoring in the Trenches:’ Clothing the British army during the First World War’ at Men at War: Masculinities, Identities, Cultures Swansea University, Wales, UK.
- 2009: ‘The War Office, mass mobilisation and the design of First World War khaki service dress’ at the Design History Conference Writing Design: Object, Process, Discourse, Translation University of Hertfordshire, UK.
Research Students
Ahmed Jameel, ‘Authorial roles in writing creator-owned comics,’ University of the Arts London, second supervisor with Dr. Roger Sabin, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
Giulia Bonali, ‘Wearing the change: Fashion in Portugal after the April Revolution,’ Birkbeck-University of London, second supervisor with Dr. Luis Trindade, Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies.
