The Author

Russell Harris, curator, author and translator, read Oriental Studies at Balliol College, Oxford.

He is a contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography, The Routledge Encyclopedia of 19th Century Photography, The Oxford Companion to Food, various international journals and magazines and has published books on photographic portraits of India's ruling princes from the Lafayette archive held by the V&A Museum and the Bassano and Vandyk archives at the National Portrait Gallery.

Russell is the co-author with Hélène Alexander, director of The Fan Museum, Greenwich, of Cool, a book on fans seen in the Lafayette archive. With the Polish art historian, Barbara Borkowy, he wrote Automobiles of English High Society – 1902-1905: Photographic Portraits by Lafayette, published in Cracow, Poland, 2007. His latest book, Daisy of Pless: The Happy Years was published in a bi-lingual Polish-English edition by Castle Pless, Poland, in 2011.

He has translated literary and political works from French and Arabic and has been a guest lecturer at the Association for Historical & Fine Art Photography, London, The Eurohistory Conference, San Francisco, and the British Council, New Delhi and is a feature writer for the Lahore-based magazine Libas International, the Cairo design magazine Magaz and The Asian Art Newspaper. He currently works as an academic consultant at the Institute of Ismaili Studies.

He is the curator of exhibitions of late-Victorian and Edwardian portrait photographs in cooperation with the British Council (New Delhi, Mumbai and Karachi), the Nehru Centre, London, the National Portrait Gallery, the Fan Museum, Greenwich, the Bucharest History Museum, the Islamic Arts Museum of Malaysia, the Royal National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman, Jordan, the Photography Museum of Upper Austria, Kravaře Palace in the Czech Republic, the Levanger Museum, Norway, the palace museums in Pszczyna, Książ, Łancut and Kozłowka, the Municipal Museum in Tychy and the Municipal Engineering Museum in Cracow, Poland.

Details of hosting this exhibition can be downloaded by clicking this text and contacting either the author (russell.harris@vodafoneemail.co.uk) or James Stevenson (j.stevenson@vam.ac.uk).