CSDI - The Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, based at the Royal College of Art in London, brings together three institutions: the Royal College of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Bedford Centre for the History of Women at Royal Holloway, University of London. Launched in September 2001, its goal is to develop new histories of the home, its contents, and its representation. It pursues research into the changing appearance and layout of rooms in a range of buildings, from tenements to palaces; the objects that furnished those rooms; the ways rooms and objects were depicted; the manner in which people used them; and how they thought about them.

Students

The Centre has hosted a number of doctoral students researching the history of the domestic interior, registered both at the Royal College of Art and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Previous Research Students

Amanda Girling-Budd (V&A/RCA), ‘Holland & Son: A Nineteenth-Century Furnishing Firm, its Products and its Clients’

Alison Fitzgerald (V&A/RCA), 'Domestic Silver in Eighteenth-Century Dublin and its Environs: A Socio-Economic Study’

Jane Hamlett (Royal Holloway), ‘Gender in the Domestic Interior, 1850-1910'

Trevor Keeble (V&A/RCA), ‘The Idealisation and Commodification of the English Domestic Interior, 1868–1904’

James Lindow (V&A/RCA), ‘Magnificence and Splendour: The Palace in Renaissance Florence'