Dr Marta Ajmar is Associate Professor in History of Art and Director of Research at the University of Warwick. As a historian of craft, design and material culture, she works on making and regenerative design, reverse engineering and material mimesis, transcultural artisanal epistemologies and the historicity of materials, focussing both on the Renaissance/Early Modern period and on the present.
Before joining the University of Warwick, she led the V&A/RCA Postgraduate Programme in the History of Design and was Deputy Director of the V&A Research Institute (supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), where she developed interdisciplinary research projects and higher education programmes. This included the project Encounters on the Shop Floor, a transdisciplinary collaboration between makers, designers, artists, academics and museum professionals exploring making as an embodied way of knowing and modelling multimodal pedagogies. The resulting co-edited volume is forthcoming with UCL Press/V&A.
She is currently working on the monograph Material Mimesis: Local and Global Connections in the Arts of the Italian Renaissance (supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship), exploring transcultural artefacts and the circulation of artisanal skill and technological knowledge between Europe and Asia.
Between 2002 and 2006 she was lead scholar and co-curator for the major V&A research-led exhibition At Home in Renaissance Italy, supported by the Getty Foundation and the AHRC. Her edited/co-edited publications include Approaching the Italian Renaissance Interior: Sources, Methodologies, Debates (Oxford, 2007); At Home in Renaissance Italy (London, 2006); and Approaches to Renaissance Consumption (Oxford, 2002).
She has received funding from many bodies including the Getty Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the AHRC, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.
Email:Â Marta.Ajmar@warwick.ac.uk