Pat Kirkham will give a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Thursday, October 13, at 12 pm. Her talk is entitled “Re-thinking Charles and Ray Eames and Hollywood.”

In this talk Kirkham will focus on the close relationship between personal friendships and social and professional networks in her current study of Charles and Ray Eameses’ relationships with Hollywood, and explore reactions to a topic that some see as falling between design and film. She will also discuss the experience of working in book form on a topic that she first conceived as a digital project.

Pat Kirkham is Professor Emerita at Bard Graduate Center and was recently appointed Professor of Design History at Kingston University. She studied history as an undergraduate at the University of Leeds and received her PhD from the University of London. She taught the history of architecture and design as well as film and media studies at De Montfort University in England before moving to Bard Graduate Center. Her many publications include Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 1995); Women Designers in the USA, 1900–2000: Diversity and Difference (ed. and contributing author; Yale UP, 2000); Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design (Laurence King, 2011); The Gendered Object (ed. and contributing author; Manchester UP, 1996); and History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400–2000 (ed. with Susan Weber; Yale UP, 2013). She is currently in residence at Bard Graduate Center as a Research Fellow where she is working towards completing a book on the multiple interconnections between Charles and Ray Eames and Hollywood. Her study brings together social, cultural, design, film, and political history, and she is keen to assess the interrelations between the Eameses’ networks of friendship and acquaintance and those related to work.