Cat Rossi

Research statement

Cat’s research areas include 20th and 21st century design, architecture and craft, post-war Italian design and architecture, club culture, and feminism; a diverse range of subjects underpinned by questions of social responsibility, environmentalism, and the politics of design and architecture. Current research projects include a forthcoming new international exhibition on Radical Design, and HARVEST with Professor Charles Holland. 
 
Publications include Designing Craft in Italy: from Postwar to Postmodernism (MUP, 2015), and Post-Craft (Sternberg Press, 2022), The Italian Avant-Garde (Sternberg Press, 2013), both co-edited with Professor Alex Coles. Forthcominng publications include Beyond the Dancefloor: Club Culture, Design and Nightlife (Bloomsbury, 2027) co-edited with Nina Serulus and Borders and Boundaries in Design History: Crossing, Contesting, Interrogating, co- ed with Victoria Kelley, Jessica Kelly, Anne Massey, and Kim Trogal (Bloomsbury, 2027). In addition to multiple chapters for edited publications, she contributes articles to peer-reviewed journals including The Journal of Design History, Design and Culture and The Journal of Modern Craft. Cat has also contributed articles to publications including The Architectural Review, Disegno, Dirty Furniture, the Financial Times and Material Intelligence.  
  
Cat has co/curated several international exhibitions. These include: Space Electronic: Then and Now, 14th Venice Architecture Biennale (2014); Radical Design: Architecture and Nightlife in Italy, 1965 – 1975, co-curated with Sumitra Upham at ICA London (2015 – 2016) and the touring exhibition Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 to Today, co-curated with Jochen Eisenbrand and Nina Serulus, Vitra Design Museum (2018 - 2022) and At Home: panoramas de nos vies domestique, with Jana Scholze and Penny Sparke, Biennale International Design Saint-Étienne (2021) and a forthcoming exhibition on Radical Design. 

Her research was submitted to REF2014 and REF2021. For REF2021 she submitted the Impact Case Study “Designing Night Life: Informing New Curatorial Activity in International Design Museums on the Design History of Club Culture”.  

Cat regularly engages in public events to share her research and has contributed to podcasts and programmes including A is for Architecture, Monocle Radio, BBC Radio 4, SAHGB and Times Radio. 

For pre-UCA research outputs please see: 

https://researchinnovation.kingston.ac.uk/en/publications/?search=rossi 

Research supervision

Cat is interested in hearing from research degree applicants whose proposals intersect with her areas of interest. Cat has supervised several PhDs to completion and served as an external PhD examiner in the UK and internationally. Her current PhD students are: 

• Sofia Cotrona, UCA/Imperial War Museum AHRC CDP, “The Social Impact of Community Participation and Co-Creation in a Museum with Imperial War Museums”. 
• Cathy Hawley, “Mothers Making Space”. 
• Anna Kampouri, “Spatial representations as metanarrative in children’s graphic novels: an architect’s perspective to graphic narration”. 
• Carma Masson, “Serious Play: Towards a Theory of Playful Architecture”  
• Pierre Shaw, “Critical Spatial Praxis: Creating Conditions and Pedagogies of Support”. 
• Chloe Young, “Domestic Ecologies: An Ethnographic Study of Multi-Species Cohabitation”.