Hannah Rumball

Background

About Hannah Rumball

Hannah Rumball is a senior lecturer and an academic working across a range of interests in dress history and material culture. Hannah teaches on, and is coordinator for, Critical Studies on the BA (Hons) Fashion Business, BA (Hons) Textiles and Business and BA (Hons) Fashion Communication and Business. She is working on research into the Northern Irish tailored garment the Ulster, illustrated in her article “The Ladies Ulster in the 1870s and 1880s: From “Eccentric Looking” to “Beau Ideal”” Textile: Cloth and Culture 21.1 (2023), for the EU research project Groupement D’Intéret Scientifique Apparences, Corps & Sociétés (ACORSO). She has worked on projects for the National Trust and The Regency Town House, and has worked as a costume mounter, researcher and lecturer.Her research areas include nineteenth and early twentieth century women's dress, with a particular specialism in Quaker Plain dress and its fashionable adaptation. Hannah was awarded her PhD in material culture, dress history and Quakerism, from the University of Brighton in 2016. Her doctoral subject was conceived independently, after having completed an AHRC fully-funded Masters by Research at Kingston University on the subject of the prescriptions of Quaker dress. The University of Brighton awarded her a fully-funded studentship position to undertake the doctoral project. Her research has a particular focus on object analysis and material culture as illustrated in her article “British Quaker Women’s Fashionable Adaptation of their Plain Dress, 1860-1914” Costume 52.2 (2018). During the summer of 2018, Hannah visited Uganda where she undertook research into local textiles with a particular focus on the production of bark cloth in Masaka, a traditional region of its production. Hannah is a founder member of the international C19th Dress and Textiles Reframed network, a group of dress/textile/fashion historians who have found common interest in rethinking some of the common perceptions, and misperceptions, about dress and textiles in the long 19th century. They hold free monthly online, international 'At Home' symposiums where researchers showcase their latest research, providing a community where like minded dress historians come together to share and debate fresh ideas in the field. Hannah has been surpervising a PhD with the working title,"How Women in Asylums in Nineteenth Century Britain Found Their Voice: Protest and Subversion Through the Art of Needlework."