Dr Elizabeth Deans is the Assistant Director of the Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture (CSCA) based at Downing College where she is also a Bye-Fellow. Elizabeth is a historian specialising in architecture, drawings, and prints and of post-Restoration England and the architecture of Christopher Wren . She is especially interested in practices and processes found in book and object culture, administration, and sites of production, such as offices and building sites, from the late-sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries in Britain, France, and Early America. Her research explores the materiality of thinking and making in and about architectural space. Elizabeth has published on architectural drawings and the formation of practical knowledge in offices, on building sites, through travel networks and diplomatic channels.
Elizabeth’s first monograph, Wren’s Architects: A Material History of Practice in England, c. 1660-1730 (forthcoming), examines the Office of the Works under the surveyorship of Sir Christopher Wren. The book examines Sir Christopher Wren as a mentor to two clerks–Nicholas Hawksmoor and William Dickinson–whom he bred up into architects. It is both a history of the practice in England and an intellectual history of architecture, social mobility, and state formation. Her future book projects include Nicholas Hawksmoor and the English Gothic Church and a volume on the educational capacity of the building site in seventeenth-century Europe, Architecture in Rising.
Elizabeth is open to supervising topics related to the history of architecture, drawings and prints, material culture and decorative arts in Europe and Early America, from c. 1550-1850.
Elizabeth has held fellowships at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and the Smithsonian Institution, and her research has been funded by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB), the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (PMC), the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), The Bibliographical Society, The Georgian Group, the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, and other funding bodies.