Angela McShane is a tutor for the RCA/V&A MA in History of Design.
She supervises postgraduate research at the MA, MPhil and PhD levels and facilitates curatorial research projects for the Victoria and Albert
Museum exhibitions and publications. A social and cultural historian, Angela McShane offers courses on 'Cultural Contexts' and 'Research Aims and Methods'. Her research and publications focus on social practice and the material life of the everyday in Early Modern England (c.1550–1750), specialising in popular political cultures through cheap print (especially political broadside ballads), drinking cultures (including the materiality of drinking: glasses, tankards, etc.) and objects of emotion (i.e. beds, etc.).
Angela McShane gained her first degree in History from the University College of Wales (Aberystwyth), a PGCE from the University of Leicester and, after a period in secondary and tertiary history teaching, she gained her PhD from the University of Warwick in 2005. She held an Early Career Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University in 2005/6. She has been an Associate Fellow of the History Department, University of Warwick since 2005.
Angela McShane has lectured in English and European early modern history at Northampton, Leicester and Warwick Universities, and from 2004/5 on the RCA/V&A course. She joined the Research Department at the V&A and the RCA/V&A programme team as a permanent member of staff in December 2006.
Major collaborative research projects that draw directly upon the large collections at the V&A include an ESRC funded network project with social and cultural historian Dr Phil Withington (Cambridge University) entitled Intoxicants and Intoxication in Historical and Cultural Context (2008–2010) and with Dr Phil Withington and Professor Beat Kumin (Warwick) a European Science Fund project entitled 'The Historical Formation of European Drinking Cultures'. In addition, she is preparing a project, 'Bed and Bord', with a family and gender historian Joan Bailey (Oxford Brookes University), cultural historian of medicine Sasha Handley (Northumbria University) and textiles curator Sue Prichard.
Angela has been involved in the forthcoming Quilts exhibition contributing an essay to the catalogue, and to the temporary Art of Drinking display and accompanying book. She peer reviews for Textile History and Journal of Design History.
In January 2011 she will spend a month at the Yale Centre for British Art as the V&A/Yale exchange fellow working on ‘The Historical Formation of Drinking Cultures’ project.