Director: Professor Jeremy Aynsley

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) centres (2001–6) provided a focus for high quality strategically important research across the arts and humanities, bringing together groups of researchers from different institutions and environments to work together on related projects.

In 1999–2000, Professor Jeremy Aynsley, in the Department of History of Design was awarded one of ten national awards for a dedicated centre for the study of the domestic interior, in collaboration with the Research Department of the V&A, the Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Royal Holloway, University of London.

The Centre has developed new histories of the home, its contents and its representation. At the heart of the research undertaken by the CSDI has been a broad-ranging analytical survey of the ways in which Western interiors are represented. Part of this work has involved the compilation of a database of visual and textual sources charting representations of the domestic interior in the West from 1400 to the present. The accompanying CSDI book, The Imagined Interior: Representations of the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance, is the definitive study of changing representations of the domestic interior in North America and Europe from 1400 to the present. It represents the work of Centre staff and many of the scholars associated with its programme of conferences and symposia.

The RCA is continuing the work of the CSDI through a number of related staff and student projects.