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Alyssa Myers

Alyssa Myers (BA in Art History ‘19) has moved into her second year of her PhD program at the Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. Alyssa’s research develops at the intersection of art history, material culture and the history of design, focusing on the forms, functions and networks of the 18th century suburban London villa. Her MA dissertation at the Victoria & Albert Museum and Royal College of Art was titled ‘My first and last thought is, how it will look’: Dining in the Eighteenth-Century British Country House. For her annual PhD review in 2024, Alyssa has been doing research at the British Library, and later moved to York to deeply engage with the English country house heritage. Her recent presentation entitled The 18th Century Suburban London Villa: an Early Modern Retirement Home advances her scholarship on this topic.

We asked Alyssa what shifts within the humanities has she witnessed since her PhD career has started:

“Throughout my education, from my BA in art history at UTA, to history of design for my MA and now social history for my PhD, I have seen how mutable and interchanging ‘history’ as a discipline has become. Art history and design history are like two sides of the same coin, with materiality and material culture at the centre. Social history borrows from both and is an umbrella term for putting people at the forefront, but still utilises methods and sources from art history, design history, architectural history and more.

The skills and knowledge I learned at UTA in art history have continued to influence my research and are still relevant. I now find myself in the ‘country house’ field of study. Which is truly a fascinating lens for understanding how the different disciplines of history all have a place and are in play together. For example, British country houses are often still considered treasure houses with incredible collections of paintings and sculpture, ‘fine art’. Architects designed these houses to fit stylistic expectations for the time. And because of their role as power houses, owners commissioned bespoke interiors and furnishings from the top designers, such as Robert Adam, a name I came across during my time at UTA as an example of the wider Neoclassical movement.

People also lived in these houses and interacted with their ceramics, glass and silver collections daily. They wore fashionable clothes appropriate for their rank. And these houses and gardens were kept running by a team of servants. One building can cover all these different types of history. We may all be focused on individual aspects of these buildings, but we all interact in the same sphere and borrow from each other as needed. It really showcases the way history has shifted to a more communal discipline, which in my opinion, is the only way to survive the challenges humanities are facing globally.”