Catherine Harper led Architecture and Design at the Faculty of Arts between 2007-11. Her own work covers textile practice and theory with specialisation in scale public art, speculative exhibition work, performance, and the construction of creative-critical texts. She is a founder member of the university's LGBT Queer Life Research Hub.
Catherine's research activity included practice-led and traditional methodologies. She has written on craft, textiles, the body, gender and subjective narratives, edited the UK Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture, been a contributing Editor for Selvedge, and has sat on the Editorial Board of The International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education.
She received a 1st Class (Hons) in Constructed Textiles from University of Ulster, Belfast, subsequently gaining a PG Diploma in Art and Design and a PhD at that institution. Her practice-based doctorate was funded by Ford Motors and focused on the construction of three-dimensional woven glass, carbon and Kevlar fibre components for automotive and engineering composites, with particular emphasis on the impact of yarn type and structural bifurcation on flexural rigidity and tensile strength.
Post-PhD, Catherine gained an MA in Textiles from Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and securing three year funding from that institution for a second doctorate on textile performativity and desire. Having completed four years of this study Catherine elected to conclude her research as a book rather than a doctoral thesis, and the resultant text (Intersex Berg, 2007) was reviewed as follows:
Ultimately, this is an exceptional book for an audience that could desperately use an informed, sympathetic, and understanding voice. If I knew someone who was struggling with their intersex condition or someone who wanted to know how others have experienced and dealt with their intersex condition, Catherine Harper’s Intersex would be at the top of my list of recommended readings.
Hartlaub, M.G. (2009) Living Between the Binary: A Review of ‘Intersex’ by Catherine Harper. Journal of Sex Research 46:5, 509-510.
A textiles practitioner by training, who has also realised large-scale public site commissions, and undertaken speculative exhibition work and performance, Catherine began work on her second solo-authored book while at Brighton Fabrics of Desire (Berg), as well as completing her editing of the four-volume 800,000 word Textiles: Primary and Critical Sources (Berg's parallel work for their 2009 Fashion version). The latter is structured into four themed sections with an introductory editorial essay and included contributions from Faculty of Arts members Dr Joan Farrer, leader of the DR-i Design Research Brighton, and Professor Lou Taylor, researcher in Dress History. Catherine was also a founder member of the University of Brighton LGBT Queer Life Research Hub.
Following five years at Brighton she left to become Dean of the School of Arts and Digital Industries at the University of East London.
