Deborah Sugg Ryan

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT DEBORAH SUGG RYAN

I am a design and cultural historian. My recent research focuses on houses, interiors and products and I have written the official history of the Ideal Home Show. I am currently writing a history of the modern kitchen for Reaktion.I am an experienced television and radio presenter, onscreen expert, consultant, speaker and writer. Credits includes series 1-5 of BBC Two’s A House Through Time, Channel 5’s Your Kitchen: 60 Years of Fads and Gadgets and BBC Radio 4’s Trading Spaces and Fitted and Kitted. I have worked as a consultant to brands on media partnerships, most notably for DIY chain Wickes via Clarion Communications. I’m represented by Knight Ayton Management. I started my career as a curator at the V&A and have subsequently advised on their exhibitions, most recently Food: Bigger Than the Plate (2019). I began my academic career in 1990 and from 2016-20 I was Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Creative & Cultural Industries at the University of Portsmouth where I am now Professor Emerita of Design History. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.My last book Ideal Homes, 1918-39: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism was published in the Studies in Design and Material Culture series by Manchester University Press in 2018. It won the 2020 Historians of British Art Book Prize for Exemplary Scholarship in the Period After 1800 and was shortlisted for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion. It was republished as a trade book in 2020 under the title Ideal Homes: Uncovering the Design and History of the Interwar House, with a new introduction on researching your house history. I was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for 2012-13 to support this research for which I undertook a programme of knowledge exchange activities with Media 10, owners of the Ideal Home Show. This research draws and extends my PhD ‘The Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition and Suburban Modernity, 1908-51\'​ (1995) and ‘Ideal Homes\'​, the exhibition that I curated for the Design Museum in 1993.Focusing mainly on the work of pageant masters Frank Lascelles and Gwen Lally. I have also published several articles on the revival of historical pageants and spectacle in Britain, the US and the British Empire in the twentieth century, Drawing on many years of teaching fashion and textiles student, and as a vintage clothing enthusiast with a big collection of clothes and accessories from the 1930s to 1960s, I have been a \"Best Dressed\" judge for Goodwood Revival and Southwick Revival.