Ruby Rutter

I am a historian of emotion, lived experience, domestic spaces, and gender, with a specific interest in reconstructing how people in the past understood and navigated their daily lives. My PhD, titled Elite Women, Emotion, and the Lived Experience in the Eighteenth-Century Country House, examined the lived experiences of women in the eighteenth-century country house by knitting together diaries, letters, wills, recipe books, objects, and other material culture to reveal how women felt about their lives and homes. I interrogated themes such as mental and physical health, comfort, and mortality to build a picture that fleshed out the women’s lives, experiences, and stories.  My PhD was supervised by Prof. Sasha Handley and Prof. Hannah Barker at the University of Manchester and awarded in 2022. Prior to my PhD, I studied BA (Hons) History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art (2010-2013), and MSt Literature and Arts at the University of Oxford (2014-2016).

My work as the 2024 Bedford Fellow builds on my PhD by looking at how marketers and tradesmen utilised the emotional connection that people fostered in their homes to sell products. To do so, I’m looking at the incredible collection of trade cards and advertising ephemera from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bestowed to the university by John Bedford, to identify how these cards incorporated design elements that engaged potential customers emotionally. For example, a furniture maker’s trade card showing new cradle set within a domestic scene encourages the viewer to conceptualise as domestic space— perhaps their own homes— and the emotional implications of the presence of a new cradle.

This research will further explore the important relationship between emotion, material culture, and the home, whilst establishing the role that ‘feeling’ had on the consumer revolution.