AUTHOR

Dr Barbara C. Morden is a Cultural Historian, Lecturer and Writer in Art History and Literature with degrees from the Universities of Nottingham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She worked for the Open University for many years as an Associate Lecturer and Research Consultant in Arts. She has been a regular contributor of articles to the periodical The English Review. She has written for academic journals and delivered papers on literature, art, and learning strategies for the electronic age at conferences in both the UK and the USA. She has been a Visiting Lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Teesside.

Dr Morden’s research and publications are concerned with the literary, the visual and the landscape arts of the 18th and 19th centuries. Specific literary interests include the work of the Williams Wordsworth, Blake and Morris together with the novels of Jane Austen. She has addressed the Jane Austen Society and has been a regular speaker at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. She has lectured at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle on the taste for Chinoiserie and on the impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on taste and the arts; and at the Darlington Railway Museum on the impact of steam locomotion on early 19th century culture, literature and painting under the title Dragons of Apocalypse. A recent writing project focused on the 18th century pre-romantic poet Mark Akenside.

As a specialist in adult learning over the years Dr Morden has worked for the Universities of Birmingham, Keele, Leeds, Newcastle and Durham. In addition, she had much success in organising and leading weekly and residential courses in the Arts through her business initiative Teesside Leisure Learning. As a result, Dr Morden is well known in the North East of England; also nationally for her dedication in bringing the Arts to a wide audience through her entertaining and informative public lectures and presentations, including her acclaimed ‘one woman show’ on the life and work of Jane Austen: England’s Jane. Her interest in the painter John Martin (a contemporary of Austen) stems from her work on aesthetic theory of the 18th and 19th centuries: the Sublime, the Beautiful and the Picturesque. It was also shaped by her Northumbrian roots which she shares with her subject: John Martin.

Dr Barbara C. Morden’s latest book is a biography of the painter Dame Laura Knight – one of the leading British painters of the 20th century.

Laura Knight: A Life
ISBN 9780857160508