Dr Elaine Tierney

I am part of the academic faculty that sits at the heart of the V&A Research Institute. In this capacity, I teach on the V&A / RCA History of Design Postgraduate Programme and the V&A / ICL Thinking Through Materials undergraduate module.

As a historian of design, I am interested in the material dimensions of urban life. My first monograph, Celebrating the City: Making Festivals in Early modern London and Paris (Manchester University Press, 2026), investigates the material culture of early modern politics, specifically the practical realisation of festivals and their troubled relationship to early modern ideals of the city. My new project, ‘Transient City: Provisional Architectures and Early Modernity’, moves beyond festivals to explore the full range of temporary structures that were built, used and abused by early modern people. This work interrogates narratives of urban improvement that were at the heart of the social, political and economic development of urban environments in the past, and which continue to impact on the cities we live in now.

I am also one half of Time is Away, a cross-disciplinary collaboration across research, radio and site-specific sound artworks. Time is Away was part of the Principal Residency Program at La Becque (La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland) where we created a new cross-disciplinary project ‘Time is Away: Crystal Radio’. In 2026, we were awarded an Assetto Fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London, to develop the exhibition and research project, ‘The Department of Euterpe, 1926-2026’.

I welcome enquiries about research collaborations and PhD projects that are relevant to my interests.

Publications

Celebrating the City: Making Festivals in Early Modern London and Paris, Studies in Design and Material Culture Series, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2026, 336 pp

‘Designed at a Distance: Transnational fireworks for the birth of the Prince of Wales in 1688’, in Celebrations at Court: Ephemeral objects, materials and machineries in the early modern period, ed. Hansen, M.F., Haack Christensen, A., Svenningsen, J., and Tarp, L., New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026, pp. 338–56

With Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin and Charlotte Wildman, Researching Urban Space and the Built Environment, Manchester: Institute of Historical Research / Manchester University Press, 2022

‘Contested Ideals: Designing and Making Temporary Structures for Louis XIV’s Entrée into Paris in August 1660’, in J.R. Mulryne and Krista De Jonge (eds), Architectures of Festival: Fashioning and Re-Fashioning Urban and Courtly Space in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 139–68

‘“Dirty Rotten Sheds”: Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 50:2 (2017), pp. 231–52

Research projects

Thinking Through Materials (ICL / V&A module)

Time is Away (programme archive, 2013-present)

‘Time is Away: Crystal Radio’ (La Becque, Switzerland, 2024)

‘The Department of Euterpe, 1926-2026’ (Warburg Institute, UK, 2026)