Claudia Treacher

Claudia Treacher is a doctoral researcher working on material and visual culture. Her research areas include art and politics during the Second World War in Britain, conscientious objection, and family history. Claudia is a member of the Centre for Design History and the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories.

Claudia has a BA in History of Art and an MA in Creative and Critical Writing both from the University of Sussex, and she also studied for part of her BA at Koç University in Istanbul. She worked as a Lecturer teaching on the Cultural and Critical Studies undergraduate course at the University of Brighton in 2019.

Claudia has co-facilitated workshops and symposia, including an AHRC-funded symposium for doctoral researchers on collecting practice titled ‘Collectors, Collecting, Collections’ in 2019, and a workshop with scholar Alex Juhasz on fake news for members of the public in 2018. In 2018 Claudia was also funded by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education to contribute to a workshop at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, which explored new methods of historical storytelling. In 2019 she undertook a placement at the British Library to catalogue George Orwell’s Collection of Political Pamphlets, and contributed to an EU-funded podcast for the public on Future Wor(l)ds, a project about feminist language and political spaces, at Lighthouse in Brighton. She has given papers at the University of Cambridge, De La Warr Pavilion, University of Sussex, the British Library, the annual TECHNE congress, and the Cultural Studies Association Virtual Conference.

She is currently researching her doctoral thesis on art and politics during the Second World War in Britain. Her thesis is titled: ‘Radical Art during WWII: Conscientious Objection and Utopianism in the Work of Don Treacher’. This research is an exploration of the art of conscientious objectors through a previously undocumented body of artwork by Don Treacher, who was her great-uncle. This research will explore the political implications of his anti-war designs created during the Second World War and how they were affected by his experience with legal and art institutions in the wider context of conscientious objection. Ultimately, the research uses his artwork as a lens through which to focus on the wider context of COs along with its varied visual language and political belief.