Dr Oliver Cox

I lead our growing portfolio of partnerships with universities in the UK and internationally in support of our mission to champion design and creativity in all its forms, advance cultural knowledge, and inspire makers, creators and innovators everywhere. This includes responsibility for our Collaborative Doctoral programmes, PhD placements, Fellowships and Exchanges, alongside the development of new teaching and research opportunities across the V&A’s family of sites. I am also the national lead for the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership consortium, which comprises 15 cultural and heritage organisations and consortia.

I am a historian by training, and received my undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford. My research interests are rooted in the global histories of the eighteenth-century country house and the ways in which these collections and spaces have been understood and interpreted by visitors. I am currently Principal Investigator on a British Academy Innovation Fellowship – ‘Private’ Spaces for Public Benefit: Country Houses as sites of Knowledge Exchange Innovation.

Publications

Co-authored with Dr Tarnya Cooper, ‘Afterword: The Public Country House (title tbc)’, in L. Nelson and A. Parham (eds.), Conversations in the American Landscape: History, Place and Justice (University of Virginia Press, Forthcoming).

‘Estate Duties: How the Country House Became English’, Apollo (January 2024), p. 95.

‘By far the greatest & most perpetual source of happiness in my life has been, & is, seeing’: Christopher Hussey’s visits to country houses, 1920–70’, in C. Ridgway and T. Dooley (eds.), Visitors to the Country House in Ireland and Britain: Welcome and Unwelcome, Dublin, 2023

‘Twenty-first century visitors in eighteenth-century spaces: challenges and opportunities’, in S. Hague and K. Lipesage (eds.), At Home in the Eighteenth Century: Interrogating Domestic Space, Routledge, 2021, pp. 307–324

‘From Power to Enslavement: Recent Perspectives on the Politics of Art Patronage and Display in the Country House’ in Paul Mellon Centre’s Art and the Country House project