Lisa Godson

Dr. Lisa Godson researches, teaches and writes about architecture, material culture and art. Her books include Modern Religious Architecture in Germany, Ireland and Beyond; Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World; Making 1916: Visual and Material Culture of the Easter Rising and The Secret Lives of Objects. Recent publications include ‘Self-Determination and Usable Pasts, 1922 and 2022’ in Art and Self-Determination: a Reader (2023) and ‘Bodily-Material Culture Techniques in the Spaces of the Devotional Revolution’ in Journal of Victorian Culture (2023).

Godson’s collaborations includes the award-winning feature documentary Build Something Modern with Still Films, based on her research into modernist architecture in West Africa and as research consultant to: the Irish Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition Self-Determination: a Global Perspective (2023-4), the Victoria & Albert Museum for the design history of the vaginal speculum (2021), the artist Eimear Walsh for ‘Romantic Ireland’ at the Venice Biennale (2024) and the artist Jesse Jones for ‘Tremble Tremble’ at the Venice Biennale (2017).

Godson is currently Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College Dublin while writing a critical material history of the site of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, on sabbatical from her role as Programme Leader of the MA in Design History and Material Culture at the National College of Art and Design.