>Becky Conekin
Fashion Historian, Writer
Dr. Becky Conekin is a fashion historian, theorist and writer at the London College of Fashion. An American from the Deep South, she earned her PhD in Modern History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1998. She has held fellowships at the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, CRASSH at the University of Cambridge, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Dr Conekin’s first book, ‘The Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain', used the 1951 events across the United Kingdom as a prism through which to analyse a society and a government recasting national identity and culture after WWII.
In 2002 she co-edited ‘The Englishness of English Dress’ with Professor Christopher Breward. Then, initially under the auspices of the AHRB-funded, ‘Fashion and Modernity’ project, she started working on writing relating to the life of fashion model, photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller. Dr. Conekin co-edited the special 10th anniversary Fashion Theory (March/June, 2006), dedicated to Vogue magazine, with fashion curator Amy de la Haye, focussing on Miller and Vogue, a project she is currently continuing to pursue with London’s Conde Nast’s support. She has spoken on Miller in Berkeley, Paris, Florence, Berlin, Philadelphia, Toronto, Cambridge and London. She is writing a further piece on Miller’s foodie life after photography for Gastronomica.
Dr. Conekin has just embarked on her second academic book project, currently entitled ”Model Girls” in 1950s London & Paris: Gendered Identities and Employment’, for which she recently received a British Academy Fellowship.
Selected Academic Honours and Fellowships
British Academy Small Grant for work on ‘Model Girls’ in 1950s London & Paris: Gendered Identities and Employment, 2008-09.
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, 2004- Present.
Directeur d'Etudes Invité in British & Irish Studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, March and May, 2008.
2004-2006, Associate Fellow at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Science and Humanities, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England. In residence Summer, 2006.
Fellow at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A, 2004-2005.
Joint Major Research Grant for ‘Fashion and Modernity’ Project, Central St. Martins/London College of Fashion, Arts and Humanities Research Board (A.H.R.B.), 2001- 2004
Research Grant in Aid of Publication, A.H.R.B., the British Academy, 1998 – 1999.
Sawyer Fellowship, Advanced Study Center, International Institute, University of Michigan, Autumn, 1995.
Rackham Research Partnership with Professor Geoff Eley for ‘Constructions of the National Past in British and German Cinema, 1960-1992’, Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan, 1994-1995.
Hewlett International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan, 1994- 1995.
Social Science Research Council & American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, (N.Y), Western Europe Program, 1993-1994.
Selected Publications
‘“Model Girls” in 1950s Paris and London’, chapter for a book entitled The Business of Beauty: Modelling as Text, Image and Industry, co-edited by Joanne Entwistle, Berg Publishers, 2009.
“She did the cooking with the same spirit as the photography”: Lee Miller’s life after photography, Photography and Culture, Vol. 1, Issue 2, October 2008.IN PRESS.
‘”Magazines are essentially about the here and now. And this was wartime’: British Vogue’s Responses to WWII”, for Gender, Labour, War, and Empire: Essays on Modern Britain, co-edited by Philippa Levine and Susan R. Grayzel, Palgrave, IN PRESS, 2008.
‘Lee Miller’s Simultaneity: Photographer & Model in the Pages of Inter-War Vogue’, chapter in Fashion as Photograph, edited by Eugenie Shinkle, I. B. Tauris Press, 2008.
“Lee Miller’s WWII Reporting for British Vogue”, Special Issue: “Fashioning Society” Journal for the Study of British Cultures, Vol. 14, no. 2, 2007: 151-62. (ISSN 0944-9094).
‘”The Man in a Diving Suit who Does not Dive”’: A Preview of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s ‘Surreal Things’ Exhibition, History Today magazine, April, 2007, vol. 57, issue 4: 4-5.
Fashion Theory, volume 10, issue 1/2, 10th anniversary volume, Vogue Special Double Issue, co- editor with Amy de la Haye and contributor. Co-author of introduction: 7-12 and author of ‘Lee Miller: Model, Photographer & War Correspondent in Vogue, 1927-1953’: 97-126, March/June, 2006. (ISBN: 184520275-9)
'Lee Miller and the limits of post-war British modernity: femininity, fashion, & the problem of biography', in Fashion and Modernity, edited by Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans, Oxford: Berg Press, 2005.
'The Jury is Out’: What do you think about What Not to Wear?’, a video made with Maggie Norden and Andy Lee of LCF, Fashion & Modernity on the Charing Cross Road Exhibition, 28 September - 1 October, 2004 (the culmination of Fashion and Modernity AHRB grant projects between LCF and CSM).
'The Autobiography of a Nation': The 1951 Festival of Britain, Manchester University Press, Studies in Design Series, 2003.
The Englishness of English Dress, co-edited with Christopher Breward and Caroline Cox. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002. (ISBN: 1 85973 523 1)
‘Fashioning the Playboy: Messages of Style and Masculinity in the pages of Playboy Magazine, 1953-1963’, Fashion Theory, vol. 4, no. 4, December, 2000: 447-66.
Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945-1964, co-edited with Frank Mort and Chris Waters. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999. Co-author of the introduction and author of chapter twelve: ‘”Here is the Modern World Itself”: The Festival of Britain’s Representations of the Future’ (ISBN: 1 85489 105 7)