Margaret Stewart
BAHons, MLitt, FSAScot
Lecturer and Cast Curator, eca

ESALA, Edinburgh College of Art,
Level 1 Staff Room
75 Lauriston Place,
Edinburgh,
EH3 9DF
Edinburgh, Scotland
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0) 0131 221 6140
email: m.stewart@eca.ac.uk

Profile

I am an art historian with a specialism in architectural history. I have taught at eca’s Architecture School since 1995 and published research about the relationship between history teaching and the studio. Formerly I held curatorial posts at the Mackintosh Collection at the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, and at Glasgow Museums (Glasgow Girls and Scotland Creates), and was employed by the Buildings of Scotland, and by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland as a researcher of regional architecture and neoclassical school buildings. My ongoing architectural specialism is the architectural and landscape designs of the Earl of Mar (1675-1732) and the Scottish Historical Landscape (fig. 1-6). I have also published on Edinburgh’s urban development, its historic buildings and the cultural history of Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Since January 2009 I have curated the historic plaster cast collection at Edinburgh College of Art. My forward plan for the collection includes an international plaster cast conference at eca (2011) with publication of the catalogue raisonné (2012), and two essays in international journals (2010-12) (fig. 7-14). Researching the Cast Collection will involve archival and curatorial visits to Athens – archives in Benacke Museum, and the display at the New Acropolis Museum. Archival and cast collections research at Canova Museum at Possagno and the Accademia Gallery and the Opera del Duomo, Florence. It is hoped to form partnerships with some of these institutions based on shared collections’ history.

Research Publication From 2002 to present

Published refereed articles

- ‘The metaphysics of place in the Scottish Historical Landscape: patriotic and Virgilian themes, c.1700 to the early nineteenth century’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, Autumn, 2002, pp.240-264.
- with Lynda Wilson, A Review of the Current Literature on the Relationship between History and Studio, Transactions, online journal of CEBE, May 2007.
- with Lynda Wilson, ‘The Relevance of Architectural History to the Architecture Design Studio: a trial of a new teaching method with final year undergraduate students’, proceedings of First EAAE-ENHSA Sub-network Workshop on Content and Methods of Teaching Architectural Theory in European Schools of Architecture, Department of Architecture, PHL Campus Diepenbeek, Hasselt University, Belgium, 21-23 September 2006.
- with Anuradha S. Naik, ‘The Hellenization of Edinburgh: Cityscape, Architecture and Athenian Cast Collection’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 66:3, September 2007, pp. 366-389. (This essay received the Scott Opler Prize of the Society of Architectural Historians).
- ‘Regenerating a Highland Heritage: Lord Mar’s approach to Historic Houses’, Architectural Heritage XVI, October 2007.
- with Lynda Wilson, ‘The relationship between architectural history and the studio: a survey of staff opinion in the six Scottish schools of architecture’, Architectural Heritage XVII, September 2008.

Compiler and/ or contributor

- Co-author of Chapter 1 of Edinburgh: The Making and Remaking of a Capital City, eds. Paul Jenkins and Brian Edwards, EUP, 2004.

Forthcoming

- Chapter entitled ‘Scenery and Scenes: the plaster cast collection and its 
architecture at Edinburgh College of Art’ for ‘Revel: the spirit of Edinburgh
College of Art,’ to be published Autumn 2010.

Conference and invited papers (summary)

- Earl of Mar and the Scottish Historical Landscape. Edinburgh College of Art Research Seminars, April 2002.
- The Earl of Mar’s landscape design for Alloa, at The Royal Commission for the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, May 2003.
- Recovering the ‘Decent pleasures of heart and mind’…, AHSS Annual Conference, Dundee Conference, 10-11 November 2006, ‘Regenerating a Highland heritage – Lord Mar’s approach to historic houses.

Awards

2003 Edinburgh College of Art Research grant for digital reconstruction of the Earl for Mar’s plan for Edinburgh.

2005 Edinburgh College of Art Research grant for Cultural Context in Studio Study (with Lynda Wilson).

2006 the following received towards publication cost of ‘Axis and Vista: the architectural, landscape and constitutional plans of the 6th Earl of Mar, 1700-1732’, (Bucknell University Press, USA)

£1000 from Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 2006   £1,000 from Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland

£5,000 from Clackmannanshire Heritage Trust

£500 Society of Art Historians

£500 Strathmartine Trust

2008  for the eca Cast Collection

£800,000 Heritage Lottery Fund

£76,634 Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, curator’s salary over two years

£1,600 from eca research Board for research in Greece