Research fellows 2026

Claire Jones

Failure and creativity: a reassessment of Rodin after The Age of Bronze

Claire Jones will be working on the research project Failure and Creativity: A Reassessment of Rodin after The Age of Bronze, drawing on the extensive publications available in our Research Library. Auguste Rodin’s The Age of Bronze is often cited as a foundational work of modern sculpture. Rather than approaching it as a triumph for Rodin, however, this project explores how the controversy generated by allegations that it had been cast from life became an oppositional yet generative force in his practice. The project will also contribute to a wider exploration of the connections between supposed ‘failure’ and creativity.

Claire Jones is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Birmingham. Her wider research centres on nineteenth-century sculpture and the decorative arts in France and Britain, with particular emphasis on the intersections between sculpture and the decorative arts, discourses of making, and exhibition histories. Her publications include Sculptors and Design Reform in France, 1848 to 1895: Sculpture and the Decorative Arts (2014) and Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe: Seventeenth Century to Contemporary (2020), co-edited with Imogen Hart.

Hannah Kahng

Stephen Cripps and improvisation

Hannah Kahng will use the Henry Moore Institute’s archival material relating to the artist Stephen Cripps to examine improvisation as a critical term in his work of the 1970s and early 1980s. Her research will consider Cripps’s drawings, photographs and performance ephemera alongside social and organisational models developed in the military, in which he had a longstanding interest, and the fire brigade, where he was employed. The project reflects Kahng’s broader interest in examining how new models of subjecthood were generated and tested through experimental art forms in the late twentieth century.

Hannah Kahng was recently Art History Fellow at the University of Arkansas, USA. She was also previously a Research Assistant at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, and has held a UCLA Art History Graduate Fellowship. Her recent journal publications include ‘I Come to Meet It, to Be Submerged: Carolee Schneemann in the Light of the Projector’, Art Journal (2026), and ‘Optophonetic Dreams: Raoul Hausmann and the Electric Prosthetic’, Leonardo (2026).

Sophie Mak-Schram

Public (art) pedagogy: Sculpture as School in the work of Betty Rea and the AIA

Sophie Mak-Schram’s research project at the Institute focuses on the relationships between socially engaged sculpture, contemporary art in primary education and artists’ political organising during the 1930s. Taking as its particular focus the practice of Betty Rea, a founding member of the Artists International Association (AIA), Mak-Schram will consider Rea’s sculptural, pedagogical and political activities as lenses through which to understand one another, including her connection to Pictures for Schools. Rea was the partner of painter Nan Youngman, who led Pictures for Schools, a series of exhibitions of contemporary art for sale to education authorities, to which Rea contributed works.

By re-examining the different elements of Rea’s work through queer and intersectional perspectives and considering the AIA as a pedagogical as well as a political strategy, the project aims to deepen our understanding of the relationships between radical art education, socially engaged sculpture and artists’ political organising in the 1930s.

Sophie Mak-Schram is Lecturer in Fine Art at Cardiff Metropolitan University and is part of BAK Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries. Trained as an art historian and experiential educator, Mak-Schram completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie-funded PhD examining forms of learning in practices we might recognise as ‘art’. The PhD formed part of a wider project exploring the future or futures of socially engaged practice and was undertaken from 2021 to 2024. Recent projects include Dream Inheritances, in collaboration with Alice Rekab at Chapter Arts Centre (2026); To Shift a Stone (2025-26), commissioned by Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales; and Stretching Thresholds, Holding Streams (2024-25), made in collaboration with Jeanne van Heeswijk and commissioned by Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Switzerland. Their first monograph, Pedagogies of the Art-Proximate, is forthcoming from Robida in autumn 2026.

Joshua Oduga

Instruction, Ecology, and Infrastructure: Sculptural Systems Beyond the Object

Joshua Oduga will work with archival material relating to his PhD thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art, ‘Engineered Relations: Artist-Built Performance Systems and the Infrastructures of Intermedia, 1960s-Now’. During his time at the Institute, Oduga will focus primarily on archival material relating to Rose Finn-Kelcey and John Newling. He will also use the Research Library to situate his work within broader historical and theoretical frameworks, particularly those relating to conceptual art, performance and installation.

Joshua Oduga is a first-generation Nigerian American interdisciplinary artist, scholar, curator, professor and writer. His artistic and scholarly practices examine archives, alternative histories, oral and musical traditions, exhibition systems, and the infrastructures through which art and culture are produced, circulated and sustained. His research has been supported by numerous fellowships and residencies, most recently at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives. His work has been exhibited at the Torrance Art Museum, PAM, Durden and Ray, and the Claremont Colleges. His curatorial and institutional experience includes roles with Art + Practice, the Hammer Museum, the Getty Research Institute, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Various Small Fires and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. In 2021, Oduga co-founded Central Server Works, an artist-run gallery, publishing house and interdisciplinary production platform working across exhibitions, publishing, film, sound and performance.

Inbal Strauss

From Studio to Street, from Gallery to Garment: Henry Moore’s Textile Designs and the Democratisation of Modernist Art

Moore scholarship has long privileged his monumental public sculpture, celebrated for bringing art into everyday life. Yet his smaller-scale fashion and furnishing textiles remain comparatively understudied, despite bringing art into British homes and wardrobes.

Focusing on Moore’s 1940s collaborations with Ascher and Whitehead, this project will ask how he translated his aesthetic language for commercial textile manufacture, how the textiles contributed aesthetically and socially to post-war cultural reconstruction, and how closer attention to them might deepen our understanding of his contribution to the democratisation of art.

Through archival and collections-based research, the project will argue that Moore’s textiles were not peripheral curiosities but central to his democratic modernism, as well as significant precedents for later artist–brand collaborations.

Trained in product design and fine art, Dr Inbal Strauss is a researcher examining the politics of aesthetic production and reception through the twin optics of art and design. She completed her AHRC-funded DPhil at the University of Oxford and has held fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Ashmolean Museum. Her research at the Henry Moore Studios & Gardens will inform her subsequent Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre.