Career Details

Tara Hamling is RCUK / Roberts Research Fellow in the Department of History and Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, where she is currently based. She is a member of the Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Tara was educated at the University of Leicester, where she gained a BA Hons (First Class) in the History of Art and was awarded the Luke Herman Prize (1997); the University of Birmingham, where she gained an M.Phil in History of Art (1997-98) and the University of Sussex, where she gained her PhD (1998-2002). During her postgraduate career she was awarded three scholarships; a one-year Ochs scholarship with the British Archaeological Association to fund her M.Phil research; an AHRB postgraduate studentship and a Paul Mellon Doctoral Fellowship to support her doctoral project.

Between 2003 and 2006 she held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Art History Department at the University of Sussex, where she also taught a broad range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Tara has also worked with Historic Royal Palaces as Guest Curator for the Permanent Exhibition ‘Introducing Hampton Court Place’.

Tara is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She was appointed to her current post at the University of Birmingham in 2006.

Current Research

I have broad interests in the cultural history, visual arts and material culture of Tudor and Stuart Britain. My work has focused on the relationship between the visual arts and religious changes resulting from the process of the Reformation. My approach to the study of art, architecture and artefacts is interdisciplinary, employing methodologies from art history, history, theology, literature, anthropology, cultural studies and visual studies.

A large part of my research has been concerned with the relationship between imagery in the decorative arts and life in the early modern domestic household. I am particularly interested in the effects of the Reformation on the nature of domestic decoration and furnishings, and on the ways in which imagery in interior decoration operated alongside devotional and conduct literature to support behaviour and habits of thought within the home. This research has resulted in a monograph; Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Protestant Britain, c.1560-c.1660, which will be published by Yale University Press in 2010.

My future research plans include a major interdisciplinary study of The Early Modern House in England (co-authored with Catherine Richardson) and a more focused project, provisionally entitled ‘Styling the Life Cycle in Early Modern England: the visual and material culture of domestic life’ which investigates the competing forces of tradition and novelty on cultural rituals and associated images and objects surrounding the life cycle.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Level 1

Lectures for the ‘Reformation, Rebellion and Revolution: The Making of the Modern World’ Module

Practising History Intensive Study Module: Majesty and Monarchy: The Cult of Queen Elizabeth I

Level 2

Option:  The Visual and Material Culture of Early Modern England

Level 3

Reading and Reviewing options

Dissertation Supervision on topics in Early Modern History

Postgraduate

I convene the MA in Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon and the Cultural History of Renaissance England and the MA in The Cultural Heritage of Shakespeare’s England

Postgraduate Supervision

I am interested in supervising research projects on topics relating to the visual and material culture of early modern Britain; post-Reformation religious and cultural practices; life in the domestic household. This might include any aspect of the intersection between the visual arts and the Reformation, or everyday domestic life. Though my own work has focused primarily on Britain thus far, I am interested in comparisons with the situation in the Protestant Netherlands so would welcome proposals for topics relating to the Dutch domestic household.

I am currently supervising research students working on the following topics:

• Practices of household religious observance in Seventeenth-Century England

• The meanings of hunting scenes in Seventeenth-Century decorative art

• The cultural significance of domestic objects in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries 

Selected Publications

Books

Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Protestant Britain, c.1560-c.1660 (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2010)

Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings co-edited with Catherine Richardson (Ashgate, forthcoming 2010).

Art Re-formed? Re-assessing the Impact of the Reformation on the Visual Arts co-edited with Richard L. Williams (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007). 

Recent Articles and Chapters

‘Guides to godliness from print to plaster’ in Michael Hunter (ed), British Printed Images: Essays in Interpretation (Ashgate, forthcoming 2010)

‘Reconciling image and object: religious imagery in Protestant interior decoration’ in Hamling and Richardson (eds), Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (Ashgate, forthcoming 2010)

To see or not to see? The Presence of Religious Imagery in the Protestant Household’ Art History, 30, 2, (April, 2007) pp.170-197.

‘The appreciation of religious images in plasterwork in the Protestant domestic interior’ in Hamling and Williams (eds) Art Re-formed? Re-assessing the Impact of the Reformation on the Visual Arts (2007), pp.147-168.