Dr Barbara Brownie
- Associate Dean (Education)
Dr Barbara Brownie is a design theorist whose research explores art and design in the context of spaceflight.
Barbara’s research is often interdisciplinary, straddling the disciplines of communication systems, fashion, performance, product design, film and television, and engineering. She is concerned with the environment of space – particularly microgravity – and its effects on art and design practice.
Her most recent monograph, Art in Orbit, explores the relationship between the arts and spaceflight sectors, and the factors that need to be considered when artists develop work for the space. This research has been the basis for several student/staff collaborations and knowledge-exchange projects. Working with the Moon Gallery Foundation, Barbara has produced artwork and writing for launch to the Moon, where it will be housed on the body of a lunar rover on the lunar south pole.
Barbara’s practice is predominately in Education and Academic Quality. Her work is focused on curriculum development and enhancement, and she has written and validated new UKHE and TNE programmes, working both for UK universities and their international academic partners. She leads academic school-wide and institution-wide enhancement projects, and supports academic teams to innovate and share best practice. In 2020, she curated an exhibition entitled Educator/Maker that examined the dual identity of academics in the creative arts as educators and makers, and showcased artefacts produced by lecturers in the process of teaching. She is currently exploring the ways that AI can be used to enhance the student experience, and has piloted the use of AI teaching assistants in AcrossRCA.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
More information
Research funding
‘Reading Hacks: new approaches to textual learning’. University of Hertfordshire Learning and Teaching Innovation Awards (2019)
‘Animating Theory’. University of Hertfordshire Learning and Teaching Awards (2018)
Going Global: Enhancing international cultural, social and professional perspectives with the student experience (2016)
Current and recent projects
Creative practice for spaceflight
2022–present
Barbara has expanded her investigation into design for weightlessness to more broadly consider the roles that creative practitioners can play in space exploration. She is exploring the place of the visual arts in the emerging commercial spaceflight industry, and the ways in which microgravity alters approaches to visual arts practice. She is particularly concerned with the ways in which post-gravity thinking prompts critical reflection on existing approaches to practice.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Brownie, B. (ed.) (2025). Moon Bound. The Hague, NL: Stichting Moon Gallery Foundation.
Brownie, B. (2025). Art in Orbit: Art objects and spaceflight, London: Bloomsbury.
Brownie, B. (2021). A Sense of Space: the separation of dress and body in microgravity. The Senses and Society, 16 (3).
Brownie, B. (2020). Dressing the Weightless Body: Subjective verticality and the disoriented experience of dress in microgravity Clothing Cultures, 6 (3).
Brownie, B. (2019). Spacewear: Weightlessness and the Final Frontier of Fashion, London: Bloomsbury.
Brownie, B. (2019). Clothes as Pseudo-Events: Ballyhoo, Rapture Bombs and Reginald Perrin. In: Sitbon, C. and Crossley, L. eds., Deception: Spies, Lies and Forgeries. Netherlands: Brill.
Brownie, B (2016). Dictionary Dressings. In: De Vries, F. & Hoette, R. (eds.), Dictionary Dressings: Re-Reading clothing definitions towards alternative fashion perspective. Eindhoven: Onomatopee.
Brownie, B. (2016). Acts of Undressing: Politics, Eroticism, and Discarded Clothing. London: Bloomsbury.
Brownie, B. and Graydon, D. (2015). The Superhero Costume: Identity and Disguise in Fiction and Fact, London: Bloomsbury.
Brownie, B. (2015). Fluid Typography: Transforming Letterforms in television idents. Arts and the Market, 5 (2).
Brownie, B. (2015). The Masculinisation of Dressing Up. Clothing Cultures, 2 (2).
Brownie, B. (2014). Transforming Type: New Directions in Temporal Typography. London: Bloomsbury.
Brownie, B. (2014). A New History of Temporal Typography: Towards fluid letterforms. Journal of Design History, 26 (4).
External collaborations and activities
(2020–present) Member, Space Habitats Committee, International Astronautical Federation.