Board

Monica received her MA in Art History and Curatorial Studies from Brigham Young University in 2008. She has taught art history at Seattle University and Central Washington University since 2010. She has worked as a docent at the Seattle Art Museum since 2013 currently serves as the Adult Tour Training Chair for the docent body.  She has been a guest lecturer on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and William Morris at the Seattle Art Museum (2019), MLA (2020), and CAA (2021). She also maintains the art history blog Alberti’s Window: http://albertis-window.com

She has been a member of the William Morris Society in the United States since 2018. She is interested in the influence of William Morris on the contemporary painter Kehinde Wiley, and has written on this topic for the News from Anywhere site for the William Morris Society in the United States (December 2018) and CAA (February 2021).

Imogen teaches in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She works on modern art and material culture in Britain, especially the objects and interiors associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. Her book Arts and Crafts Objects (Manchester University Press, 2010) includes two chapters on William Morris. She is co-editor, with Jason Edwards, of Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts (Ashgate, 2010), which features her chapter “An ‘enchanted interior’: William Morris at Kelmscott House.” She has contributed chapters on William Morris to William Morris and the Art of Everyday Life, edited by Wendy Parkins (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010); The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, edited by Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Palaces of Art: Whistler and the Art Worlds of Aestheticism, edited by Lee Glazer and Linda Merrill (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2013); and Teaching William Morris, edited by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller and Jason D. Martinek (Farleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2019). Her article “Craft, War, and Cultural Diplomacy: Modern British Crafts in the United States, 1942–1945” appeared in Winterthur Portfolio 53:2–3 (Summer/Autumn 2019). Her most recent book is Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe, Seventeenth-Century to Contemporary (Bloomsbury, 2020), a collection of essays co-edited with Claire Jones.

Collector, bibliographer, and typographer Mark Samuels Lasner is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press. His interest in, and admiration for, William Morris began almost in childhood—growing up in an Arts and Crafts house and having met the last living person to have known Morris and Burne-Jones.

Mark has published widely on Victorian literature and art and has organized many exhibitions related to these subjects. In 1996 he co-curated with William S. Peterson “William Morris: The Collector as Creator” mounted by the Grolier Club to mark the centenary of Morris’s death. From 1999 to 2004 he served, variously, as the newsletter editor, webmaster, secretary-treasurer, and eventually president of the William Morris Society in the United States. The Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, donated to the University of Delaware in 2016, contains artwork, letters, manuscripts, and printed materials by Morris and his circle.

Sarah studies the art, and design, and landscapes of Victorian Britain. She is particularly interested in human interactions with the natural world, and of course the works of William Morris. Her PhD dissertation, “‘The beauty of the bough-hung banks’: William Morris in the Thames Landscape”, investigated Morris’s complex lifelong relationship with the river and its tributaries. 

She holds MAs in Historic Landscape Studies from the University of York, UK, and Art History from the University of Delaware, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Delaware. She has held fellowships at institutions including the Huntington Library, New College Oxford, the Yale Center for British Art, and Dumbarton Oaks, and she is a proud past recipient of the William Morris Society in the United States’s Dunlap Fellowship.

She has served on the board of the William Morris Society in the United States since 2019, and currently holds the position of Vice President as well as spearheading the our website and digital communication projects. Along with the Society’s Twitter account, she manages two personal Twitter projects about William Morris: @EveryMorris, tweeting about every printed pattern by Morris & Co., and @ScreenMorris, tweeting about uses of Morris & Co. patterns in TV and movie set design.

A retired New York attorney (JD, Duke, 1974; BA, Claremont McKenna College, 1971) living in Montclair, NJ, David specialized in representing nonprofit organizations. He has long had an interest in William Morris, dating back to college in the 1970s when a biography of Morris fell on his head in the Scripps College library. On a business trip to London as a young lawyer, he visited Morris’s boyhood home in Walthamstow. He is a major book and design collector, specializing in world-wide graphic arts of the period 1890-1930, with a major collection of private presses (including Kelmscotts) and other good design of that era, and the bulk of his furniture and furnishings also date to that era.

He has served on the board of The Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms in Parsippany, New Jersey, the home of Gustav Stickley in the 1910s, as a trustee or trustee emeritus since the year of the museum’s formation in 1989, where he curated the exhibits William Morris and the Printed Page: English Influence on American Book Design; C. R. Ashbee and the Guild of Handicraft: An English View of the Craftsman Ideal; and Will Bradley: His Look. He has also served on the board of The Center for Book Arts and The American Friends of Arts & Crafts in Chipping Campden, a support organization for a UK museum focused on C. R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft and other Cotswold artists.

Tracy Meserve is the librarian for the Arthur D. Jenkins Library at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum. She also acts as the associate editor of The Textile Museum Journal. She is currently pursuing an M.A. in Decorative Arts and Design History from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University, with a focus on textile arts. She holds a Master’s in Library Science from the University of Maryland (2013).  Formerly, she has served as a youth services manager at Alexandria Library, a librarian at DC Public Library, and a publications assistant at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

An instructor at Loyola University Chicago and Rush University, Brandiann researches 19th-century visual culture and word/image theory. Her dissertation, completed in 2018, focuses on the Kelmscott Press and Morris’s contribution to Victorian aesthetics. She is also a founding member of the Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society, and in that capacity, Molby has organized their annual conference for the past three years.

Jude is Professor of English and former Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Salem State University, and habilitated professor in the Polish Academy. His areas of teaching and research are Victorian literature and culture and Anglophone Caribbean literature. He has published extensively on the Victorians, especially on Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Henry Newman, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens, appearing in journals such as Victorian Poetry, Victorian Studies, the Carlyle Studies Annual, the Dickens Studies Annual, Times Literary Supplement, the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Texas Study in Literature and Language, Modern Philology, and the Hopkins Quarterly.

He is author/editor of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his Contemporaries: Liddon, Newman, Darwin, and Pater (Garland, 1994), Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism (Palgrave, 2004), Science, Religion, and Natural Theology.  Volume 3. Victorian and Science and Literature. 8 volumes (Pickering & Chatto, 2011), The Sermons and Spiritual Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Vol. 5. The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 8 vols. (Oxford, 2018), and editor of the forthcoming volume, Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglophone Transnational (Vernon 2021), where his essay appears, “‘[E]ither I’m nobody, or I’m a nation’: Home, History, and the Diasporic Transnational in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” He is also Guest Editor of a Special Issue, The Poetry and Spirituality of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Religion and the Arts 24.4 (2018), in which his essay appears: “‘[E]ye and heart alive to the natural beauty of the world’: Anne Pratt, Hopkins, and a Theology of Nature.” His most recent publications include “‘English affairs and Norse’: Carlyle’s Igdrasil, Norse Mythology, and the Myth of British Racial Ancestry,” appeared in the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (2018), “Welch Israelitism: The Geopiety of Hopkins’s St. Beuno’s Dominical” (forthcoming, The Hopkins Quarterly), and “Forbidden Fruit: The Economy of Food in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market” (forthcoming, AngloSophia). He serves on several editorial boards, among them Victorian Poetry, The Hopkins Quarterly, the Dickens Studies Annual, MIND (Poland), Merope (Italy), and AngloSophia – Studies in English Literature and Culture (Italy).

Adrienne works at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. She earned her B.A. in art history and English from Mount Holyoke College and her M.A. in decorative arts and design history from the Bard Graduate Center in NYC. Her research focus on Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites – first, on the Oxford Union Murals – led her to participate in the UMASS-Amherst Oxford Summer Seminar, a 6-week summer study abroad program in Oxford, England. Her M.A. thesis was a case study of Morris & Company’s contributions to three American commissions, c. 1870-1896. She has published in “The Journal of the Women’s College Art Coalition,” an MHC student publication; “The Newsletter of the Victorian Society in America”; “The Pre-Raphaelite Society Newsletter of the United States”; and she contributed an article about a Walter Crane mural to an online blog at the Beinecke. She is a Co-Scribe for Mount Holyoke’s Class of 1998, regularly contributing updates to the MHC “Alumnae Quarterly.” Adrienne lives in Hamden, CT with her husband Kurt and her daughter Evelyn (Evey).

Anna is the Clarence A. Davis Visual Arts Curator at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. Her research interests include Arts and Crafts movements, contemporary craft and activism, printmaking, communal artmaking, and the inter-media connections between architecture, bookmaking, and textiles. Her article “Photographs, Pens, and Print: William Morris and the Technologies of Typography” was published in Book History in 2018. She is also an extremely novice letterpress printer. Anna holds a PhD in Art History and Textual and Digital Studies from the University of Washington. She is also on the boards of the Arthur Dove Block and the Seward House Museum, both in upstate NY. She has been a member of the William Morris Society since 2018, and currently serves as its Treasurer.