Dr Christopher Harris

About Dr Christopher Harris

Dr Christopher Harris is a Principal Lecturer and the Academic Lead for the Design area of the Leeds School of Arts. He has a practice-based Doctorate from the University of Leeds, and a Masters from the Royal College of Art.

The role of Academic Lead for Design includes responsibility for the undergraduate courses, BA Fashion, BA Fashion Marketing, BA Interior Architecture and BA Design Product, and the staff teams that teach and coordinate them.

Dr Harris established BA Fashion as a new subject area in the Leeds School of Arts in 2014. He wrote the course documentation and set up the fashion design studio. Additionally, Dr Harris has written the course BA Fashion Marketing, which will take its first cohort of students in 2016.

Dr Harris's background is in textiles and fashion, having taught at the University of Leeds for 12 years prior to joining Leeds Beckett University. He has previously worked as a printed textile designer with clients including Paul Smith, Marks & Spencer and Ben Sherman.

Current Teaching

Dr Harris teaches predominantly on BA Fashion and BA Fashion Marketing. He helps deliver the critical and contextual elements of these courses, along with the practice-based research elements of Levels 5 and 6 of BA Fashion.

PhD Supervision.

Research Interests

Current area of practice-based research relate to abstract painting and its relation to African American textiles, which will culminate in a collaborative exhibition of abstract painting and textiles at The Atkinson, Southport in 2018.

Dr Harris is also developing a series of academic papers from his Doctorate thesis, 'Hiraeth: Designing a Welsh Identity'. These include, the relationship between the prosodic pattern in the poetry of Dylan Thomas and abstract painting, the potential connections between the design process and practice-based doctorate research, the proposition of the 'Imagined Unconscious' in relation to art and design practice, and 'the seawall as a petroglyph'.