Dr Melanie Hayes

Post-doctoral Research Fellow, European Research Council Advanced Grant project, STONE-WORK

My research focuses largely on eighteenth-century architectural and craft history, with a specific interest in the transmission, reception and production of architecture and craftsmanship in Britain and Ireland. I am particularly concerned with the people who populate this building history, and the interdependence between the range of agents responsible for bringing these works into being. While investigative documentary research is central to my approach, there is a strong material dimension to my work, which seeks to relate the tangible evidence of a building’s fabric to the often intangible or tacit processes involved in its making. My recent research has explored the collaborative nature of work practice within the eighteenth-century building industry, contributing to a burgeoning new direction in the study of architectural labour and agency in the period.

My doctoral thesis, ‘Anglo-Irish architectural exchange in the early eighteenth century: patrons, practitioners and pieds-à-terre (TCD, 2016) http://www.tara.tcd.ie/handle/2262/85198 is a cross-disciplinary contextualisation of inter-relationships between British and Irish architectural culture and practice in the first half of the eighteenth century.

My broader research output has continued to build upon this approach, seeking to disseminate wide-ranging inter-disciplinary findings and methodology in both an academic context and at a wider public interface. My work on the research project surrounding the conservation and presentation of the museum at 14 Henrietta Street, Dublin involved collaborative engagement with public bodies and community stakeholders in bringing new research of societal importance to the wider public. This work utilised a range of innovative delivery platforms and dissemination tools including the production of multi-media digital content, public symposia and interactive workshops, and the publication of a significant volume on eighteenth century architectural and social history: The Best Address in Town: Henrietta Street, Dublin and its first residents, 1730–80 (Four Courts Press, 2020).

My role as an Irish Research Council Advanced Laureate Project Fellow on CRAFTVALUE (2019–2023) adopted a similar wide-ranging and rigorously investigative approach in seeking to challenge the traditional focus on the individual designer and patron to create a new skills-based perspective on the architecture of Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century. https://craftvalue.org/research-team/

My current role as a post-doctoral research fellow on the European Research Council Advanced Grant Project, STONE-WORK (2023–2028), which seeks to reassess the history of architecture in Britain and Ireland through the lens of material – stone – and making, focuses on retrieval of the craft processes and techniques which produced the finished stone surfaces of classical architecture in the eighteenth century.

Recent publications include:

Between Design and Making: Architecture and craftsmanship 1630–1760. Edited by Andrew Tierney and Melanie Hayes, foreword by Christine Casey. London: UCL Press, July 2024. Open Access PDF, 368 Pages, 162 colour illustrations.
ISBN: 9781800086944 DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800086937
Free open access download https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/238837

Enriching Architecture: Craft and its conservation in Anglo-Irish building production, 1660–1760. Edited by Christine Casey and Melanie Hayes, foreword by Glenn Adamson. UCL Press, 2023.
Open Access PDF, 396 Pages, 247 colour illustrations.
ISBN: 9781800083547 DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800083547
Free open access download: www.uclpress.co.uk/EnrichingArchitecture

Press & Media

Featured in a series of videos that takes a look at some of the key historical research, conservation and restoration work that went in to creating 14 Henrietta Street: Making a Museum, Meet the authors, Dr Melanie Hayes, eps. 1- 6
Featured in Olivia Kelly, ‘Lipstick on a pig? Why Dublin has failed to pretty-up O’Connell Street’ The Irish Times, 5th May. 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/lipstick-on-a-pig-why-dublin-has-failed-to-pretty-up-o-connell-street-1.3881825
Featured in Olivia Kelly, ‘Last Georgian house on Dublin’s O’Connell Street is at risk from neglect’ The Irish Times, 7th Feb. 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/last-georgian-house-on-dublin-s-o-connell-street-is-at-risk-from-neglect-1.3784304
Featured in ‘Henrietta Street museum,’ RTE Nationwide, RTE One, 7pm, October 13, 2017. https://twitter.com/rtenationwide/status/918775837813551105?lang=en

Selected Publications

Andrew Tierney and Melanie Hayes (eds.), Between Design and Making: Architecture and craftsmanship 1630–1760. London: UCL Press, July 2024.
Melanie Hayes, ‘Architects and artificers: building management at Trinity College Dublin in the 1730s and 1740s’. In Between Design and Making: Architecture and craftsmanship 1630–1760, edited by Andrew Tierney and Melanie Hayes, 119–152. London: UCL Press, July 2024.
Melanie Hayes, ‘Crafted legacies: artisanal wills in early Georgian Britain’, in "Eighteenth-Century Last Wills and Testaments," ed. Pamela Phillips, special feature, 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (volume 30), ed. Kevin L. Cope, New Jersey, Bucknell University Press, forthcoming 2024.
Melanie Hayes, Review of The Language of Architectural Classicism: From Looking to Seeing, by Edward McParland (Lund Humphries, 2024), Irish Arts Review, Summer (June–September 2024) 116–117.
Melanie Hayes. ‘The Irish in early Georgian London: living ‘out of the world there’?’, Georgian Group Journal, vol. 31 (2023):11–24.
Melanie Hayes, Review of The Early Residential Buildings of Trinity College Dublin: Architecture, Financing, People, by Andrew Somerville (Four Courts Press, 2023), The Burlington Magazine, 165 (Feb 2023): 110–112.
Christine Casey and Melanie Hayes (eds.), Enriching Architecture: Craft and its conservation in Anglo-Irish building production, 1660–1760. London: UCL Press, 2023.
Melanie Hayes, 'Retrieving craft practice on the early eighteenth-century building site'. In Enriching Architecture: Craft and its conservation in Anglo-Irish building production, 1660–1760, edited by Christine Casey and Melanie Hayes, 160–196. London: UCL Press, 2023.
Melanie Hayes, 'Fashioning, fit-out and functionality in the aristocratic town house'. In House and Home in Georgian Ireland: Space and Cultures of Domestic Life, edited by Conor Lucey, 65–84. Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2022.
Melanie Hayes, 'An Irish Palladian in England, the case of Sir Edward Lovett Pearce', Georgian Group Journal, XXIX (June 2021): 41–66
Melanie Hayes, Georgian Beginnings,14 Henrietta Street, 1750–1800. DCCCC, 2021.
Melanie Hayes, The Best Address in Town: Henrietta Street, Dublin and its first residents (1720–80). Four Courts Press, 2020.
Melanie Hayes, Review of Living Legacies: Ireland's National Historic Properties in the care of the OPW (OPW, 2018), Irish Arts Review, Summer (June–August) 2018.
Melanie Hayes, ‘Sir Gustavus Hume (1677–1731): courtly connections and architectural connoisseurship in the early eighteenth century.’ Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, vol. XIX, 2017.

Teaching

My teaching portfolio encompasses material from classical antiquity to the post-modern period, for which I have developed innovative student-based teaching strategies which aim to promote embedded learning practices and direct engagement in object-based learning in large and small group contexts. I have contributed to a broad range of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, including Junior Freshmen modules, Introduction to the Practice of Art History; Introduction to the History of European art and architecture; an elective module on Italian architecture (1400-1680) City, Court and Campagna; visiting student and broad-curriculum programmes, Making and Meaning in Irish Art, Visualising Ireland, and Art and Architecture of Ireland; research-led modules Studies in Irish Architecture and Ornament and M. Phil + Ireland.