Prf Elizabeth McKellar

Professional biography

Professor Elizabeth McKellar BA, MSc, PhD is Emerita Professor in the Art History Department and previously held the Chair in Architectural and Design History 2013-20.  She joined the Open University in 2005 having previously held posts at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Birkbeck College, University of London.  She was a Member of the Editorial Committee of the London Journal (2000-2010) and a Council Member and on the Editorial Board of the London Record Society (2008-10).  She has been an Expert Assessor for the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council Designation Scheme for Collections of National and International Importance and was a member of the Executive Council of the Association of Art Historians (1993-95).  She has regularly acted as an advisor to Historic England and was on its London Advisory Committee (2011-17).  She has been a member of Lund Humphries Editorial Board for Architectural History since 2018 and of the Editorial Committee of the Georgian Group Journal since 2012.  She has acted as a panellist for the Oxford Preservation Trust Annual Awards for Architecture and Landscape since 2019.  In 2021 she was appointed as President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain .

Research interests

Elizabeth McKellar specialises in British architecture and culture with a focus on urbanism and housing, especially in relation to London.  Her first book The Birth of Modern London (1999) remains an essential text in the field and will be re-issued in an electronic version by Manchester University Press in 2021.  She received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2011-12 to complete her book Landscapes of London: the City, the Country, and the Suburbs 1660-1840 (2013) which was published by Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and won the Society of Architectural Historians (US) Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award in 2017.  She also writes regularly on architectural and design historiography particularly that of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, the theme of her contributions to Neo-Georgian Architecture 1880-1970: a reappraisal (2016).  She is currently writing a cultural biography of the architectural historian Sir John Summerson - on whom she first published an essay in her co-edited volume Articulating British Classicism - for which she was awarded a Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship for 2018-219 and a Leverhume Emeritus Fellowship for 2021-24.

Selected Publications

Books

Landscapes of London: the City, the Country, and the Suburbs 1660-1840, (Yale University Press & Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2013)

The Birth of Modern London: the development and design of the city, 1660-1720, (Manchester University Press, 1999)

Co-editor with Barbara Arciszewska, Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Architecture, Aldershot & Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2004
Co-editor with Julian Holder, Neo-Georgian Architecture 1880-1970: a reappraisal, (Historic England Publishing, 2016)

Articles

  ‘Beyond the Walls: Traversing the Boundaries of Architectural History’ in Dana Arnold ed. Rereading Women and Architecture: Female agency and the discourses of architectural history, London, Routledge, 2024, pp. 171-86.

  'Annabel Dott and colonial, metropolitan and rural communities' in Neal Shasore and Jessica Kelly eds. Reconstruction: Architecture, Society and the Aftermath of the First World War, London, Bloomsbury, 2023, pp. 219-240.

  ‘Georgian London: A War-time ‘history of havoc and hope’, Georgian Group Journal, Vol. XXXI, 2023, pp. 179-92.

‘All roof, no walls: Peter Boston, A-Frames and the Primitive Hut in twentieth-century British architecture c. 1890-1970’, Architectural History, Vol. 62, 2019, pp. 237-69.

‘Georgian London before Georgian London: Beresford Chancellor, Rasmussen and “The true and sad story of the Regent’s Street”’, in J. Holder & E. McKellar eds., Neo-Georgian Architecture 1880-1970: a reappraisal, Swindon, Historic England Publishing, 2016, 36-51.

 ‘The Villa: Ideal Type or Vernacular Variant?’ in, P. Guillery ed., Built from Below: British Architecture and the Vernacular, Routledge, London, 2010, pp. 49-72. 

‘C. H. B. Quennell (1872-1935): Architecture, History and the Quest for the Modern’, Architectural History: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, 50, 2007, 211-46

‘Representing the Georgian: Constructing Interiors in Early Twentieth Century Publications, 1890-1930’, Journal of Design History, 20:4, 2007, 325-44

‘Popularism versus professionalism: John Summerson and the twentieth-century creation of the “Georgian”’, in Barbara Arciszewska and Elizabeth McKellar (eds), Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Architecture, (Ashgate, 2004), 35-56

‘Peripheral Visions: alternative aspects and rural presences in mid-eighteenth century London’, Art History, 22:4, 1999, 495-513

‘Architectural History: The Invisible Subject’, The Architecture Journal, 1:2, 1996, 159-64

Teaching interests

Teaching contributions to Open University courses include: .

• ‘Pugin’s Writings’, in C. Price ed., Tradition and Dissent, OU, 2008, pp.119-28, for course AA1000 Art and its Audiences.
• ‘St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham’ DVD 1 x 20 minute film, for course AA1000 Art and its Audiences.
•  ‘Blenheim Palace: Reading “the Duke of Marlborough in story”’, in S. West ed., Interpreting Global Heritage, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010, pp. 180-204, for course AD281 Understanding Global Heritage.
• ‘The Metropolitan Urban Renaissance: London 1660-1760’, in E. Barker ed. 'Art and Visual Culture 1650-1820: Academy to Avant-Garde', London, Tate Publishing, 2012, pp.101-140, for course A226 Art and Visual Culture.
• ‘Urban Form in Spitalfields’, DVD 3 x 20 minute films, for course A226 Art and Visual Culture, 2012.
• A844 MA in Art History, Part Two, Chair online module in production.
• Author Block 1, Section 3: ‘Conservation Challenges: Tall Buildings and the London Skyline’.
• Editor Block 3 ‘Inhabiting Space’ and author Block Introduction.
• Author Block 3, Section 2: ‘Urban Space: Eighteenth-Century London & Nineteenth-Century Paris’.
• ‘Transatlantic architecture: classicism, colonialism and race’ in E. Barker ed., Art Commerce and Colonialism 1600-1800, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017, pp. 153-84, for course A344 Art and its Global Histories.
• ‘Building the British imperial world 1900–1939: the architecture of New Delhi’, in R. Dohmen ed., Empire and Art: British India, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2018, pp. 145-177, for course A344 Art and its Global Histories

External collaborations

Elizabeth McKellar was Co-Investigator as part of a research team from the Design and Art History Groups at the OU on the ‘Empowering Design Practices: transforming places of worship into inclusive and sustainable places’ 2014-20 Project.  It was funded by the AHRC under their Connected Communities and Design’ Highlight Notice (£1,5 million) in collaboration with Historic England, Heritage Lottery Fund, Wright & Wright Architects, The Glasshouse Architects.