Dr. Molly-Claire Gillet lecture ‘The Lace Inspectress’

Dr. Gillett is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at the University of Galway and was awarded the Desmond Guinness Scholarship Prize in 2018. This lecture, drawing from Gillett’s new monograph Irish Lacemaking: Art, Industry and Cultural Practice (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) follows the career of little-known Cork-born lace designer and inspector Emily Anderson (1856-1948) through the late-nineteenth and early?twentieth-century Irish lace industry, tracing its entanglement with changing technology, women’s education, and the meaning of ‘good design’, and sharing new photographs of Anderson’s rediscovered lace collection in the National Museum of Ireland.

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Host or Publisher Irish Georgian Society