Programme Tutor
History of Design Programme
Liaison Tutor
Critical & Historical Studies Programme
School of Humanities
hod@rca.ac.uk
chs@rca.ac.uk
Sarah Teasley’s research takes historical case studies from product, furniture and architectural design and manufacturing in Japan since the late nineteenth century to consider broader questions around design, technology and society. She is particularly interested in the roles that technical mediation and policy play in the adoption of new processes, materials and technologies, and in design as a perspective into political economy.
Sarah’s teaching and research supervision covers the design and manufacture of objects and spaces in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, within Europe and North America as well as East Asia. Her other research and teaching interests include critical theory, the history and philosophy of technology, gender and design, globalisation and the design of mass production and other large systems.
Full-length publications include Global Design History (Routledge, 2011) and 20th Century Design History (Petit Grand Publishing, 2005). Sarah publishes and lectures actively in East Asia, Europe and North America. In 2012 she is the recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Fellowship for a monograph on regional economic development, geopolitics and the furniture industry in Japan, 1890–1960.
At the Royal College of Art, she teaches on the History of Design MA, supervises MPhil and PhD research in History of Design and Critical & Historical Studies, and serves as Critical & Historical Studies liaison tutor for the Design Interactions, Design Products and Innovation Design Engineering programmes.
Dr Sarah Teasley received her PhD from the Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies of the University of Tokyo. She also holds degrees from Princeton University and Musashino Art University.
Prior to joining the Royal College of Art, Dr Teasley was assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and Northwestern University. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo Interfaculty Initiative on Information Studies (2007) and at Musashino Art University (2009), and is a research associate of the Japan Research Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is associate editor of the journal Design and Culture and the recipient of external grants and awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Academy, Design History Society, Association of Asian Studies, Society of Architectural Historians, Myers Foundation, Housing Research Foundation (Japan), British Columbia Ministry of Education and the Japanese Ministry of Education. She is an Honorary Mellon Fellow and Fulbright recipient.
Recent talks include workshops and public lectures at Parsons the New School for Design, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Columbia University, the School for Oriental and Asian Studies, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, as well as papers at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, the International Conference on Design History and Studies, and European Association for the Study of Science and Technology.