Molly-Claire Gillett completed an interdisciplinary PhD in Concordia's Faculty of Fine Arts in 2022. Her project, supervised by faculty in the Departments of Art History, Design and Computation Arts, and Art Education, in affiliation with the School of Irish Studies, focused on pedagogy and place-making in Irish lacemaking communities, from the late-nineteenth century to the present day. Her thesis won the Adele Dalsimer Award for Distinguished Dissertation from the American Conference for Irish Studies, and a monograph expanding on this project is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Visual Arts in 2025. She continues to research and teach on issues of making and place, with an emphasis on Ireland. In 2023, in collaboration with Elaine Cheasley Paterson, she organized Home/Making: intersections of craft and home, a transdisciplinary initiative that included workshops, an exhibition, and a symposium. An edited volume emerging from this series is in progress.
In her current role as Scholar-in-Residence in Interdisciplinary Studies and Practices in the Fine Arts, she co-teaches the Faculty of Fine Arts' introductory course, 'Keywords: reading the Arts Across Disciplines' with area coordinator Dr. Sandra Huber, as well as a newly-commissioned course that explores the notion of 'home' through interdisciplinary arts practice. Together, Gillett and Huber are continuing the redesign of this foundational course; they also lead a pedagogy training program for the course's twenty Tutorial Leaders and conduct research on interdisciplinary, feminist, and creative pedagogy in the postsecondary Fine Arts. They have presented this work internationally, and will be hosting a hybrid pedagogy symposium exploring these themes in March 2024.
FFAR298 Home: Place and Practice (Interdisciplinary Fine Arts)
FFAR250 Keywords: Reading the Arts Across Disciplines (Interdisciplinary Fine Arts)
IRST398 Irish Materialities: critical perspectives of spaces, places and things (School of Irish Studies, Cross-Listed with Geography, Design and Computation Arts, and Art History)
ARTH263 Nineteenth-Century British Illustration and Graphic Arts (Department of Art History)
Articles
(2023) “‘Storying’ landscape and material practice: Clones crochet lacemaking as Irish intangible cultural heritage.” New Hibernia Review Vol. 26 No. 4 (Winter 2022): 36-64.
(2021) “Chiloé’s St. Michael: reconsidering sources for the Hispano-Chilote School of Sculpture.” The Burlington Magazine of Art Vol. 163 No. 1424 (November 2021): 1021-1027.
(2019) Molly-Claire Gillett. “‘Home Charms’: unpacking an Irish immigrant woman’s home through speculative design”, Text and Performance Quarterly 39:4 (2019): 388-406.
DOI: 10.1080/10462937.2019.1658891
Chapters
(forthcoming 2024) “Mabel Morrison: Patron and Collector of Lace,” book chapter in The Collections of Alfred Morrison: Millionaire Shopping, edited by Caroline Dakers (University College London Press)
(forthcoming 2024) with Kathleen Vaughan, “Facing the Pandemic(s): the mask-making response to Covid -19,” The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles Vol. 7 Textiles and the Everyday (Bloomsbury)
(forthcoming 2024) “Irish Lace,” The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles Vol. 6 Trade and Industry (Bloomsbury)
(2023) “Irish Crochet: design, placemaking, and the international journey of intangible cultural heritage.” In Intangible Heritages: a conference on technology, culture and design, June 15-17, 2022 (Amps Proceedings Series, 29.1), Howard Griffin, ed., 420-429
