Isabelle Held is an interdisciplinary design historian. Employing an intersectional approach, she focuses on the body, fashion, materiality, and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Held is the Mellon Foundation Gender and LGBTQ+ History Postdoctoral Fellow at the New York Historical. Duke University Press published her first monograph, Atomic Bombshells: How Plastics Shaped Postwar Bodies.
The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Held’s PhD in history of design from the Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art. She has been awarded fellowships at museums including the Smithsonian Institution and Science History Institute. Held has taught at London College of Fashion, Pratt Institute, and the Fashion Institute of Technology and has curated exhibitions that explore design, science, material culture, and the body. Her writing is featured in publications including Design Issues, Environmental History, Fashion Theory, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, and Baron Books.
Contact: isabelle.held@network.rca.ac.uk