Projects

This British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project examines the influence of moments of socio-political unrest (including but not limited to the environmental movement of the 1960s, Second-Wave feminism, the economic crises of the 1970s, the 1980s AIDS crisis, and the 2007-2009 global financial crisis) on the depiction of domestic cleaning in British and American popular culture. I am analysing hundreds if not thousands of cleaning product ads, appliance ads, and television sitcoms and soap operas produced in this period, to understand how the notion of the "clean home" changed in response to specific anxieties and fears.