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Sarah TEASLEY

BIO
Sarah Teasley is Professor of Design at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She received her AB from Princeton University, MA from Musashino Art University and PhD from the University of Tokyo.

Prior to joining RMIT, she was Reader in Design History and Theory and Head of Programme for the V&A/RCA MA and PhD in History of Design at the Royal College of Art in London, UK. She is the author of Designing Modern Japan (forthcoming February 2022), co-editor of Global Design History (2011) and author of numerous articles, book chapters and creative project reports.
Teasley’s research focuses on two areas: old new (bio)technology and materials, and the social history of design and making. She is particularly interested in highlighting unequal economic and political relations through micro-histories of everyday practice. Her current projects include a study of how designers and makers responded to new bio-materials in twentieth-century Japan, and an effort to rethink social history from a multi species perspective. Her research is highly collaborative and transdisciplinary, applying methods across design research, history and cognate fields.

Recent work and publication

Teasley, S. (2019). Contemporary, Design, History In: The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Design since 1945, Wiley-Blackwell, London, 9-31.

Teasley, S. (2019), entries for Japanese furniture designers and furniture pieces In: Atlas of Furniture Design. Vitra, Weil am Rhein.

Teasley, S. (2018), “Methods of Reasoning and Imagination”: History’s Failures and Capacities in Anglophone Design Research In: Theories of History: History Read Across the Humanities, Bloomsbury Academic, London,183-206.

Teasley, S. (2018). Design Recycle meets the Product Introduction Hall: craft, locality and agency in northern Japan In: Craft Economies: Cultural Economies of the Handmade, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 162-172.

Connor, S., Corby, T., Redler Hawes, H., Smith, M., Teasley, S. (2017) Numbers/Data: A Roundtable In: Journal of Visual Culture 16:3, 1-32.

Adriasola, I., Teasley, S., Traganou, J. (2016) Design and Societyin Modern Japan:An Introduction In: Review of Japanese Culture and Societyvol. 28, 1-50.

Adriasola, I., Teasley, S., Traganou, J. eds. (2016). Design and Societyin Modern Japan,special issue of Review of Japanese Culture and Society Vol. 28, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu