Dr. Melissa Berry

February 1  |  2-4pm
Reframing William Morris’ Role in the British Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts Movement is often celebrated as the vision of William Morris. From his early collaborations with the Pre-Raphaelites to his embrace of socialism and his campaigns for craftsmanship, Morris wove together aesthetics and ethics to challenge prevailing expectations of art, and beyond. Yet the birth of the movement was not the story of one man; it also drew on the skills of artisans, contributions of women designers, and shifting ideals of community and reform. By moving beyond the myth of a “founding father,” it becomes clear that Arts and Crafts was forged through collective experiment, dissent, and dialogue across class and gender. Exploring these alternative genealogies reframes Morris’ role and points to Arts and Crafts as a living, contested project rather than a fixed aesthetic style.

About Dr. Melissa Berry

Dr. Melissa Berry, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Art History and Visual Studies at the
University of Victoria did her BFA with honours in Art History and Museum Studies, her MA with distinction in Art History at the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art in London with a thesis on “Le Japon à Paris: Japanese Influences in Paris 1865–1870,” and her PhD at the University of Victoria with a thesis on the context of artistic identities in Paris and London 1850–1870 and their interconnected, often translocal webs. This developed into her book The Société des Trois in the Nineteenth Century: The Translocal Artistic Union of Whistler, Fantin-Latour, and Legros published by Routledge in 2018. Her expertise in early modern art, especially 19th century Western European art, is attested, too, by many articles, conference presentations in England, France, the United States, and Canada, and courses at UVIC on the visual arts and social history.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Dr. Melissa Berry.