Dr. Elaine Cheasley Paterson is Associate Professor of Craft History in the Department of Art History at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Concordia University. She holds an MA in Canadian Art History from Concordia University (1999) and a PhD from Queen's University (Kingston, 2004). Her current funded research concerns women's cultural philanthropy in early twentieth-century British, Irish and Canadian craft guilds of the home arts movement and for tracing a lineage from this historical material to the current resurgence in DIY and craftivist practices. She has presented this research at many international conferences, including in Britain, in Ireland, in Canada and in the United States. Her writing and teaching are focused on the relationships between material culture and feminist theory, with an emphasis on the decorative arts and craft history. Another significant stream of research, emerging from her teaching, centres upon questions of skill, hybridity and pedagogy within a post/interdisciplinary contemporary craft milieu. Some of her publications include Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), with Susan Surette; ‘Crafting Empire: Intersections of Irish and Canadian Women’s History,’ Journal of Canadian Art History(2014); ‘Decoration and Desire in the Watts Chapel’ in Gender and History (2005); ‘Crafting a National Identity' in The Irish Revival Reappraised (2004); as well as a special issue of Cahiers métiers d'art - Craft Journal on Craft and Social Development (2012), with Gloria Hickey. She is on the editorial boards of RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review and Cahiers métiers d'art - Craft Journal (Montreal), a member of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative (CWAHI) and the Quebec Quilt Registry Project at Concordia, a Research Fellow of the Canadian Art Institute (Concordia) and she sits on the board of Centre des textiles contemporains de Montréal/Montreal Centre for Contemporary textiles and TRAMES, la galerie (CMTC).