Skip navigation

Dr Ellen Sampson

Assistant Professor

Department: Northumbria School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries

Ellen Sampson is an artist and material culture researcher whose work explores the relationships between clothing and bodily experience, both in museums and archives and in everyday life. Using film, photography, and writing, she examines the ways that garmnets become records of lived experience: how people and the things they wear become entwined. Sampson has a PhD from the Royal College of Art, London and was 2018/19 Polaire Weissman fellow at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and 2019/20 Professorial Fellow at University for the Creative Arts.

Ellen Sampson

The Afterlives Of Clothes 

'The Afterlives Of Clothes', was initially developed while on a Fellowship at the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018-19) and an artist’s residency at Bard Graduate Center, New York (2019- 2020). The project the project brings together archival research with auto-ethnographic writing, image, and filmmaking to explore the affect of damaged garments in museum collections. Focusing on accessories, objects which Jones and Stallybrass term “detachable parts” of the self, it seeks to highlight the bodily practices of wearing and maintaining clothes, clothing as lived and embodied experience, in objects where little or no biographical evidence exists. Asking how in a field where absent bodies and narratives are already understood as problematic, these traces might re-contextualize objects and bring into focus bodies and narratives which would otherwise be excluded from display. 

 

Curative Things

Curative Things is a collaborative project organised by the Thing Power Research Group (Leeds Arts University), Thinking Through Things (Wellcome Trust Funded Project, Durham University), and Fashion Research Network

Bringing together new scholarship at the intersections of medical humanities, fashion research and visual arts practice, this Project explores the relationship between wearable objects and human health, with particular emphasis on how artists are creatively responding to and rethinking these relations. Wearable objects might include, but are not limited to: clothing, footwear, headwear, jewellery, implants, prostheses or physical aids; things that have the potential to restrict, contain, embrace or extend the body; things that we wear and things that wear us 

 

Enclothed Knowledges

This project explores the role of practice-based research in Fashion Studies, asking how knowledge generated through practice can challenge, critique and advance the field?  In his 2017 paper, Ben Barry uses the term 'enclothed knowledge' to capture the multi-modal and multi-sensory knowledges, which acts of wearing and making clothes produce. This panel takes the idea of 'enclothed knowledge' a starting point to examine the role and position of practice-based research in fashion studies. It asks what we know through making fashion objects, images and exhibitions – and how these knowledges might differ from those produced through more traditional academic research practices?

Historically there has been a division in both fashion academia and education between those who study through making and those who study through observation. However, the 'embodied turn', and attendant reorientation of the field has revealed the porous nature of these divisions, the ways that in 'fashion thinking' theory and practice are often intertwined. In the context of current attempts to define and formalize the field, this project seeks to critically examine the role of practice-based fashion research in fashion studies. It asks how methodologies of making and wearing clothes intersect with and expand upon current concerns with embodiment, tacit knowledge and the sensory experience of dress.

 

Fashion Research Network 

I am co-founder of Fashion Research Network, an interdisciplinary network for researchers in fashion studies. Through collaboration we facilitate, disseminate and promote conversations which critically examine the nature of fashion studies and the parameters of the field. FRN brings together researchers from multiple subject areas and institutions to critically examine the role of dress in society. Founded a point when the field was both less established and less defined, FRN has played a key part in shaping understanding of fashion studies as a diverse and dynamic field in the UK. We work to facilitate conversations and collaboration between those who research through practice and those who research using traditional methodologies.  FRN is built on a model of collaboration, working with a diverse range of partners to deliver events. Past partners include FIT, University of Brighton, National Portrait Gallery and ICA. Since 2013 FRN have convened 11 symposia, and numerous seminars, reading groups, and curator talks- building a vibrant and resilient network of researchers

 

  • Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
  • Close Looking: Some Reflections on Methods and Practice based Research, Sampson, E. 7 Oct 2024, Re:Dressing American Fashion, New Haven, United States, Yale University Press
  • Pockets of Affect/Containers of Feeling, Sampson, E. 15 May 2024, The Cultural Construction of Hidden Spaces, Leiden, Netherlands, Brill
  • Border Garments: Fashion, Feminisms and Disobedience, Sampson, E., Van Godtsenhoven, K., Poblete, T., Martinez, L. 2023
  • Dirty Pretty Things: Stains, Ambivalence and the Traces of Feeling, Sampson, E. 2023, Fashion and Feeling., Heidelberg, Palgrave Macmillan
  • In Conversation: Liz Randolph and Dr. Ellen Sampson, Sampson, E., Randolph, E. 24 Apr 2023, In: Fashion Studies
  • Material Time: Wornness, Memory, and the Power of Imperfect Garments, Sampson, E. 8 Dec 2023, ECHO: Wrapped in Memory, Tielt, Belgium, Lannoo
  • The Afterlives of Clothes: a Phenomenology of the Dress Archive, Sampson, E. 2023

  • Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
  • Oral presentation: Liquid bodies: Seepages, Stains, and Interminglings 2023
  • Invited talk: Why wornness: imperfection, embodiment and the radical power of the worn. 2023
  • Oral presentation: Shoetopia 2022
  • Editorial work: International Journal of Sustainable Fashion & Textiles (Journal) 2022
  • Oral presentation: Pockets of affect / containers of feeling 2021
  • Organising a conference, workshop, ...: International Book Launch: Textile Design Theory in the Making 2021
  • Oral presentation: Fashioning Research: Embodied Experience, Self-Fashioning and the Role of Practice-Based Research in Fashion Studies 2021
  • Oral presentation: Affecting objects: clothing archives and the edges of the fashion 2021
  • Oral presentation: The body beyond the body: clothing archives, touch, and the body schema 2021
  • Organising a conference, workshop, ...: Curative Things: Medicine Fashion Art 2021

  • Isabel Mundigo-Moore Love-Clothes: Clothing, Narratives and Emotions Held in Middle-Aged Women’s Wardrobes in the UK (United Kingdom) Start Date: 01/10/2021
  • Nikola Markovic Clothes and Familial Sensory Postmemories in the Balkans: Exploring (Post)Memory-Based Design/Archival Practice Start Date: 08/01/2024
  • Wen Jiang Provisional title of the thesis: Living in Harmony: Exploring the Co-existence between British and Chinese Design Elements by Integrating British Flower Symbolism in Making Dresses and Jewellery Start Date: 05/04/2022 End Date: 19/11/2022

  • PhD August 31 2016
  • Fashion MA February 01 2009
  • anthropology BSc (Hons) July 01 2003

Our Staff


a sign in front of a crowd
+

Northumbria Open Days

Open Days are a great way for you to get a feel of the University, the city of Newcastle upon Tyne and the course(s) you are interested in.

Research at Northumbria
+

Research at Northumbria

Research is the life blood of a University and at Northumbria University we pride ourselves on research that makes a difference; research that has application and affects people's lives.

NU World
+

Explore NU World

Find out what life here is all about. From studying to socialising, term time to downtime, we’ve got it covered.


Latest News and Features

Some members of History’s editorial team (from left to right): Daniel Laqua (editor-in-chief), Katarzyna Kosior (reviews editor), Lewis Kimberley (editorial assistant), Charotte Alston (deputy editor) and Henry Miller (online editor).
Dr Elliott Johnson, Vice Chancellor’s Fellow in Public Policy at Northumbria University.
Balfour Beatty graduates at Northumbria's winter congregation
NIHR multiple and complex needs
Paramedics at work
Joint Institute of Clean Hydrogen
More news

Back to top