Dr Simona Valeriani

My role in VARI encompasses teaching on the V&A / RCA History of Design Programme, as well as contributing to the V&A’s higher education activities more widely. I currently co-supervise several PhD students (in collaboration with Birkbeck, University of London, the Royal College of Art and the University of Oxford) on topics related to the history of architecture and the city, the history of museums and the history of knowledge. I have initiated and supervised a number of doctoral placements and contribute to the V&A’s Higher Education teaching with a range of academic partners including Imperial College. I earned my Masters degree in architecture at the University of Genoa (Italy) and my PhD in Building archaeology, Heritage Preservation and Art History at the Technical University in Berlin (Germany). Before joining the V&A in 2012 I worked for seven years in the Economic History Department at London School of Economics, on projects related to knowledge formation and transmission in the early modern period in a global context. My recent projects have focused on the history and contemporary practice of architectural model making, and on the history of the Royal Albert Hall. In 2021–2, as Principal Investigator on two AHRC-funded projects on architectural models, I co-curated the exhibition Shaping Space: Architectural Models Revealed at the Building Centre in London, together with Vanessa Norwood, Harriet Jennings and Mathilde Savary. I am currently working on the history of mosaic making, with particular interests in the 19^th-century revival of mosaic techniques.

Publications

The Royal Albert Hall: Building the Arts and Sciences, Brepols, forthcoming 2024

‘Copying, building, sharing. Multiple approaches to the study of a historical model’, Are You a Model?, Meister, A. et alia (eds), JOVIS Verlag, 2024, pp. 124-128

Valeriani, S., Horsfall Turner, O., Wells, M. and Fankhänel, T. (eds), An Alphabet of Architectural Models, Merrell, 2021

Valeriani, S. and Schäfer, D. (eds), ‘The History of Technology in Global Perspective’, special issue of Technology and Culture, 6.2, 2021