Project Team
Lead Researchers
Not Only Dressed is led by Dr Hannah Field, senior lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Sussex, and Professor Kiera Vaclavik, professor of children’s literature and childhood cultures at Queen Mary University of London.
Field (PI) has written about material culture and childhood in the Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and Girlhood Studies. Her monograph Playing with the Book (2019) won the Children’s Literature Association Book Award and the Bibliographical Society of America’s Schiller Prize.
Vaclavik (Co-I) co-founded and directs the Centre for Childhood Culture, a collaboration between Queen Mary and the Young V&A in its first phase. Her book Fashioning Alice (2019) is the first to chart the emergence of Alice in Wonderland as a style icon.
Museum Partners
Young V&A
The UK’s premier national museum entirely dedicated to children, designed with young people, teachers, and families. The museum is currently undergoing a redevelopment designed around three immersive new galleries.
Worthing Theatres and Museum
Worthing Museum holds one of the most significant costume collections in the UK, with 30,000 items. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clothes are a particular strength, but the collection spans from the seventeenth century to the present day.
Musée du Textile et de la Mode de Cholet
The story of the French garment industry experienced in a historic textile factory in Maine-et-Loire. Cholet hosts yearly exhibitions about children’s clothing that explore particular brands and creators, types of dress, and colours.
Advisory Board
The network is supported by an advisory board of experts in childhood studies, fashion studies, and participatory research with children.
Board members are:
Dr Liam Berriman, Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies, University of Sussex
Professor Janet Boddy, Professor of Child, Youth, and Family Studies, University of Sussex
Katy Canales, Acting Curator, Young V&A
Gerry Connolly, Curator of Historic Collections, Worthing Theatres and Museum
Dr Annebella Pollen, Reader in History of Art and Design, University of Brighton
Dr Simon Sleight, Reader in Urban History, Historical Youth Cultures, and Australian History, King’s College London
Dominique Zarini, Chargée d'Études des Collections, Musée du Textile et de la Mode de Cholet
Network Administrator
Dr Juliette Milbach is the project administrator. Dr Milbach is a visiting fellow at the Warburg Institute at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and a research associate at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. She holds a PhD in art history from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research concerns the theory and practice of art in Russia in the twentieth century, and she has published on Arkady Plastov’s illustrations for children in this context.
Junior Research Associate
In summer 2021, the project team was joined by Fiona Gould, a fourth-year student at the University of Chicago studying history and East Asian civilizations, as part of the University of Sussex/University of Chicago International Junior Research Associate Programme.
Fiona wrote a blogpost about her research for Sussex’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY). You can read it here.
