Paul Mellon Centre Book Night

Finola O’Kane is a landscape historian, architect, and professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin. Her books include the prizewinning Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting, and Tourism, 1700–1840 (2013) and Landscape Design in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Mixing Foreign Trees with the Natives (2004). She has also published widely on eighteenth-century Dublin, Irish urban and suburban history and the plantation landscapes of the Caribbean. In 2017, she was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Mark Crinson was appointed Professor of Architectural History at Birkbeck in 2016, before that he had taught in the art history department at the University of Manchester for twenty-three years. Recently, he was Vice-President and President of the European Architectural History Network (2016–20), and directed Birkbeck’s Architecture Space and Society Centre (between 2017 and 2021). He specialises in four broad areas. His work on colonialism and architecture has resulted in three books: Empire Building: Victorian Architecture and Orientalism (1996), Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (2003, winner of the Spiro Kostof Prize), and Rebuilding Babel: Internationalism and Modern Architecture (2017). In the area of British post-war architecture he has published monographs on Stirling and Gowan: Architecture from Austerity to Affluence (2012, winner of the Historians of British Art Prize) and Alison and Peter Smithson (2018), as well as a co-edited collection (with Claire Zimmerman) on Neo-Avant-Garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (2010). On the historiography of architectural history and its relation to other disciplines he has published (co-authored with Richard J. Williams) The Architecture of Art History – A Historiography (2019), and (co-edited with Charlotte Ashby) Building/Object: Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture (2022). Finally, on industry and architecture he has edited Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City (2005), and most recently he has published his Paul Mellon Centre monograph, Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester (2022).

Steven Brindle read history at Keble College, Oxford and remained there to study for a doctorate on medieval architecture in Spain. He has worked for the last thirty-four years for English Heritage, in a variety of roles, and is currently a senior properties historian in the Curatorial Department. He has published widely on the history of architecture and engineering, with major works including Paddington Station, Its History and Architecture (2004), Brunel, the Man Who Built the World (2005), and Windsor Castle – A Thousand Years of a Royal Palace (as editor, 2018). His latest book is Architecture in Britain and Ireland, 1530–1830, published by the Paul Mellon Centre in 2023.  

Tim Clayton is an author and historian who has worked chiefly on print history and military history. His book The English Print 1688-1802 (1997) sought to trace the growth and themes of the London print trade in the eighteenth century; more recent work has concentrated on graphic satire and literary propaganda in Bonaparte and the British: prints and propaganda in the age of Napoleon (2015) and This Dark Business: the secret war against Napoleon (2018). His book James Gillray: a Revolution in Satire was published in 2022.

Tom Young is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Art Histories at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Prior to that, he was a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Warwick, the project curator of the British Museum’s exhibition Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution, a curator at Lakeland Arts, and a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. He has held fellowships at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the Huntington Library, and the Yale Center for British Art. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2023. His first book, Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c.1813–58, was published with the Paul Mellon Centre.

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson is a lecturer in film and media at UCL and a specialist in the history of colour media. Her first book The Rainbow's Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity was published by the Paul Mellon Centre/Yale in 2023. She was previously the Henry Sidgwick Junior Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge and lecturer in film studies at the University of St Andrews. Her work has been published in British Art Studies, Screen and Film History and her most recent article, co-authored with Zhaoyu Zhu (University of Nottingham Ningbo, China) received both the Screen Biennial Award and the Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award.