Faculty Member, Intellectual Heritage
Supernumerary Fellow
Linacre College, Oxford
Thesis Title: 'A MODERN-BUILT HOUSE ...fit for a Gentleman': Elites, Material Culture and Social Strategy in Britain, 1680-1770
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Dr Perry Gauci
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About
I am currently Adjunct Assistant Professor at Temple University. As the SAHGB Ernest Cook Trust Research Student at Linacre College, Oxford, my doctoral thesis explored the intersection of material culture and social status in eighteenth-century Britain and the British Atlantic world. This study offered a social and cultural reading of the architecture, landscapes, domestic interiors and furnishings of about eighty under-studied ‘gentlemen’s houses’ in the west of England. By focusing on the ways in which houses projected status for both landed and non-landed elites, it addressed important processes of social change and revisited the issue of moblity in British society. I argued that 'gentlemen's houses' were a key to understanding the permeability of the governing class as well as illustrating the combination of dynamism and stasis that characterized eighteenth-century Britain. I am at work on a monograph that will examine the social, economic and cultural implications of this transatlantic house form.
More broadly, I am interested in Britain and the British Empire in global perspective. Although my post-graduate work focused primarily on Britain, the topic developed from research on architecture and social status in the British Atlantic. This transatlantic starting point, namely colonial secretary James Logan of Pennsylvania and his house Stenton, has prompted me to think about cultural transmission and the interaction of Britain with the world in the early modern and modern periods. I hope in future to pursue research that uses similar methodology to explore the cultural and economic underpinnings of Britain’s imperial network.
As a former museum director, I also have wide experience in the field of public history and museum management and have published and presented on topics such as historic buildings and community, interpretive planning, the gentry house in the Atlantic World, and architects Charles Barry and AWN Pugin.
