Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)
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Dr Louise Hardiman specialises in the history of Russian, Soviet, and Ukrainian art and design. Her principal research interests are late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and the rise of modernism; art and design by women; the international Arts and Crafts movement; and the history of British-Russian cultural exchange. Hardiman is an independent consultant, writer, and lecturer who has taught undergraduate students and adult learners in various educational settings. A former commercial lawyer before embarking upon her second career in 2003, Dr Hardiman is a firm believer in the benefits of lifelong learning. She knows well its opportunities and challenges, including the practicalities of how to fit study in alongside the multitude of other daily tasks.
Louise Hardiman’s research interests include Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet art, nineteenth and twentieth-century British art, international modernism, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the history of British-Russian cultural exchange.
Recent publications include: Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017); “Abramtsevo and its Legacies: Neo-national Art, Craft and Design”, Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture (October 2019); and Courtly Gifts and Cultural Diplomacy: Art, Material Culture, and British-Russian Relations (Paderborn: Brill Ferdinand Schöningh, 2023).
Additionally, Hardiman has published two collections of illustrated folk tales by the Russian Arts and Crafts artist Elena Polenova: “Why the Bear has No Tail, and other Russian Folk Tales” (as editor) and “The Story of Synko-Filipko and other Russian Folk Tales” (as editor and translator).
Current research and publication projects include two monographs: “Selling the Samovar: Women and the Promotion of Russian Arts and Crafts in the West”; “The Firebird’s Flight: Russian Art in Britain, 1851-1922” (both titles are provisional); and ‘Richard Hare’s Russian Icon Collection and the Persistent Lure of Byzantium in Anglo-Soviet Artistic Relations’, Journal of Icon Studies 2023 (article under review).
The Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES)
Association for Art History
Design History Society
Society for Historians of East European and Russian Art (SHERA)