About ESALA

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Untitled Document

Margaret Stewart

Lecturer in Cultural Context (part time)

Tel: +44 (0)131 651 5788

Outline Biography

I am an art historian with a specialism in architectural history. I have taught at ECA’s Architecture School since 1995 and published research about the relationship between history teaching and the studio.

Formerly I held curatorial posts at the Mackintosh Collection at the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, and at Glasgow Museums (Glasgow Girls and Scotland Creates), and was employed by the Buildings of Scotland, and by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland as a researcher of regional architecture and neoclassical school buildings. My ongoing architectural specialism is the architectural and landscape designs of the Earl of Mar (1675-1732) and the Scottish Historical Landscape. I have also published on Edinburgh’s urban development, its historic buildings and the cultural history of Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

From January 2009 until September 2012 I was curator of the historic plaster cast collection at Edinburgh College of Art, and have published two essays about the collection in international journals, and organised and chaired an international symposium in October 2010 called ‘Patina’, which discussed the surfaces of casts and issues about cleaning them. I also organised an international plaster cast conference at ECA in 2011, and two exhibitions in 2010 and 2012. In July 2012 we produced a documentary film about the collection called 'Cast into Time: The cast Collection at Edinburgh College of Art' (23mins, Director; Anne Milne).

I am now planning the publication of the catalogue raisonné of the cast colleciton for 2013, and to complete and publish a monograph on the 6th earl of Mar's architecture and landscape designs.

Research Interests

In addition to completing the research fro the catalogue of the ECA Cast Collection (see before) I have ongoing research interests in the architecture of of the 6th Earl of Mar (1675-1732) and the Scottish Historical Landscape. Research has included working for the Buildings of Scotland Research Unit and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. I have also researched the visual history of Edinburgh University for its recently published history of the University and written ECA's contribution to the digital project SCRAN on images of European and non-European gardens, landscapes and Scottish buildings.

See video at: http://vimeo.com/48532424

Research activity

Awards

2003 Edinburgh College of Art Research grant for digital reconstruction of the Earl for Mar’s plan for Edinburgh.

2005 Edinburgh College of Art Research grant for Cultural Context in Studio Study (with Lynda Wilson).

2006 the following received towards publication cost of ‘Axis and Vista: the architectural, landscape and constitutional plans of the 6th Earl of Mar, 1700-1732’, (Bucknell University Press, USA)

£1000 from Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 2006 £1,000 from Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland

£5,000 from Clackmannanshire Heritage Trust

£500 Society of Art Historians

£500 Strathmartine Trust

2008 for the eca Cast Collection

£800,000 Heritage Lottery Fund

£76,634 Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, curator’s salary over two years

£1,600 from eca research Board for research in Greece

Publications

Publications list for Margaret Stewart

Teaching

Architectural history:

Ancient Greece

17th - 18th century in France, England and Scotland

Scottish architecture

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Late 17th and early 18th century landscape history

This article was published on Jul 14, 2011