Lynda Nead awarded Leverhulme Fellowship

Lynda Nead, Pevsner Professor of History of Art, has been awarded a 2013 Leverhulme Research Fellowship for a project entitled ‘The Tiger in the Smoke: British Visual Culture 1945-60’.

The project takes its title from the crime novel by Marjorie Allingham which was published in 1952 and adapted for a film in 1956. Set in the fog-bound streets of 1950s London, it follows the criminal activities of Jack Havoc, an ex-army sergeant and a convicted murderer, who has escaped from prison and who, with a motley band of accomplices made up of ex-soldiers and former comrades, is searching for a hoard of treasurer. The novel pursues the gang through the faded alleys, bombed terraces and abandoned cellars of the city, until the book climaxes with the death of Havoc in France.

The foggy, post-war setting of Allingham’s novel is as active an actor in the narrative as its hero, the amateur detective Albert Campion. Like many other novels and films of the period, its settings and characters are drawn from the specific social and economic environments of the late-1940s – demobilisation, bomb damage, rationing and redevelopment. Using the motif of the smoke fog, Lynda’s project will offer an interdisciplinary and critical account of British art and culture in the period following the Second World War and until the 1960s. Through a series of themed sections – such as ruins and reconstruction; domesticity and the home; colour and colonies – ‘The Tiger in the Smoke’ will define the mists or filters through which experiences and images of modernity were refracted in this period.

Lynda teaches on the BA History of Art and MA History of Art programmes as well as supervising PhD students.