Dr Anna Kallen Talley
Job title:
Postdoctoral Researcher
Biography
Dr Anna Kallen Talley, MA (V&A/RCA), AFHEA is a researcher specialising in modern and contemporary design history and cultures, with a focus on communication design, digital technologies, and the relationship between design, media, political theory and public policy. Her primary research skills lie in qualitative methods, including digital and physical archival research (including the use of web archives), object-based analysis, content analysis, comparative case studies, interviews, collaborative workshops and integrative literature reviews. Anna has an international research profile spanning the US, UK and EU, and she is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where she works on the ekip: European Cultural and Creative Sectors and Industries Policy Platform project.
Anna was awarded her Doctor of Philosophy in Design for her thesis, Design and Information Disorder in the American Mediasphere: Communication Design Infrastructures, Objects and the Aestheticisation of Politics in April 2026 from the University of Edinburgh. Funded by a UKRI/AHRC grant through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, her research examined how communication design shapes sensationalised news production across two critical junctures in US media—the 1890s and mid-2010s—situating case studies of sensational newspapers and "fake news" websites within contexts of financial crisis, rapidly changing technologies, and rising populist discourse. In 2021, Anna earned her MA in Design History and Material Culture (with distinction) from the V&A/Royal College of Art, and she holds a BFA in Art and Design History (summa cum laude) from the Pratt Institute.
In addition to her academic research, Anna has held several roles with leading cultural heritage institutions in the US and UK researching 20th and 21st-century design. These include National Museums Scotland, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (Design & Digital), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Architecture and Design), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Modern and Contemporary), the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and National Museums Scotland (Science & Technology). In 2020, she co-led the digital archiving project, Design in Quarantine, which explored methods for the online archiving of design during a period of crisis, inspired by the technique of rapid-response curation pioneered by the V&A. The project was awarded the Design History Society’s Virtual Design History Student Award in July 2020 and received international press coverage, including in the Financial Times and the New York Times, amongst others.
Anna’s publication record spans the field of cultural heritage, design and digital culture, and includes a guest-edited Special Section of the Journal of Design History on digital material culture (2026), an article in Visible Language(2025), a book chapter with Springer (2023), an article in RMIT Design Archives Journal (2021), and a contribution to Pandemic Objects (Cormier, 2024). She also has two book reviews published in the Journal of Design History (2024, 2026) and a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Curatorial Studies on a mid-20th century poster exhibition curated by Mildred Constantine. Demonstrating her interest in translating academic research for policymakers, she has contributed to the FalseWebs Network Policy Paper: Understanding and Addressing Misinformation in Scotland (2025), drawing connections between design history and contemporary misinformation campaigns. Anna has also presented papers or organised panels at a number of international conferences including conferences of the Design History Society (2021, 2022, 2023, 2026), College Art Association (2024), the Born Digital Cultural Heritage Conference (2023) and American Studies Association (2022). Prior to her postgraduate studies, she worked as a freelance journalist for Design Observer, AIGA's Eye on Design, the New York Review of Architecture, MODERN Magazine, and the Magazine ANTIQUES.
At the University of Edinburgh, Anna has held undergraduate and postgraduate tutoring positions in the Edinburgh College of Art, the Edinburgh Futures Institute, and the Institute for Design Informatics. She was awarded Associate Fellowship with Advance HE in 2025.
Since 2023, Anna has served as a Trustee of the Design History Society, one of the world's leading organisations for design history scholarship. In this role, she oversees website development, co-created a new membership portal, and is developing an online “Knowledge Bank” for educators to share teaching materials about and for design history. She was previously a member of the FalseWebs Network (2023-25), a Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded project based at Edinburgh Napier University uniting science communicators and misinformation researchers.
Anna is always open to new collaborations, so do get in touch if you are interested in working on a project together.
Anna has served as both an Undergraduate and Postgraduate Tutor on courses spanning design, culture and data at the University of Edinburgh between 2023 and 2026 and was awarded Associate Fellowship with Advance HE in 2025. She has also co-organised three workshops for PhD students, two of which have focused on foundational theories and methodologies for humanities researchers using digital sources, including digitised records and born-digital web archives. Additionally, she has given guest lectures at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (2026), the University of Edinburgh (2025), Edinburgh Napier University (2025), and the Royal College of Art (2024), on design, disinformation and digital cultural heritage.
Research
Research
In her role on the ekip project, Anna collaborates closely with all 17 project partners across Europe to evaluate qualitative and quantitative data on the project’s impact in creating networks for cultural and creative industries (CCIs), developing recommendations for EU policy on R&I and other key areas for CCIs, and supporting capacity building that equips CCIs with the knowledge and skills to boost innovation capacity, specifically around the green and digital transitions. She is also contributing to research on the digital knowledge commons and open data in the cultural heritage sector, specifically exploring the negative effects of AI scraping on the digital infrastructures of public online collections. As part of this work, she is leading on a book proposal on the digital commons and digital heritage for University of London Press series on Digital Cultural Heritage (expected submission November 2026).
In 2023, Anna led a three-month project at the V&A in London that surveyed the museum’s history of collecting digital objects, as well as evaluated protocols for the acquisition and preservation of digital objects. Outputs included an internal research report, as well as several public-facing articles for the V&A website, including a piece on the department’s history of collecting digital objects and a blog post discussing the project and the importance of research into the preservation and interpretation of digital culture.
Academic Publications, Book Chapters and Policy Papers
‘Digital Design: A History, Stephen Eskilson, Princeton University Press, 2023, pp. 296. cloth: £42.00. ISBN: 9780691181394’, Journal of Design History, 39( 2), June 2026, pp.212-213, read the publication.
‘Digital Design History: State of the Field, Definitions and Possibilities’, Journal of Design History, 39( 2), June 2026, pp.113-127, read the publication.
‘Sensational design: Layout and display typography in the visual rhetoric of information disorder’, Visible Language, 59(3), 348–378, read the publication.
‘History of Information Disorder: Production, Distribution, and Form’, in: Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) FalseWebs Research Network (ed) FalseWebs Network Policy Paper: Understanding and Addressing Misinformation in Scotland, 2025, pp. 21–24, read the publication.
‘From ASCII Art to Comic Sans: Typography and Popular Culture in the Digital Age’, Journal of Design History, 2024, epad059, read the publication.
‘Copper’, in: Cormier, B. (ed) Pandemic Objects. (London: Architectural Association, 2024).
‘Radical Uncertainties: Collecting Digital Objects at the V&A’, Internal V&A Research Report, 2023.
‘From Swiss Modernism to the International Compliant Style: Grids and Graphic Design in the Age of Information Disorder’, in Perspectives on Design III Research, Education and Practice. (Springer, 2023), read the publication.
‘Design in Quarantine: Creating a Digital Archive of Design Responses to Covid-19.’ RMIT Design Archives Journal, 11(2), 2021.
Conference and Seminar Presentations
2024
“This is Not Breaking News: A Short History of the Design of Information Disorder”, Royal Society of Edinburgh & Edinburgh Napier University: FalseWebs Seminar, September 2024.
“REF 2021 Open Access Portfolio Project at the University of Edinburgh” Capturing Creativity Week, Loughborough University and Bath Spa University, September 2024.
“Practice Meets Research: Developing a Training Workshop to Support Use of Web Archives in Arts & Humanities Research.” International Internet Preservation Consortium Web Archiving Conference, April 2024.
Panel Co-Chair, “Polycrisis and Design: Ethics, Intervention, Possibility.” Design Studies Forum-Sponsored Session, College Art Association Conference, February 2024.
2023
“Radical Uncertainties: Collecting Digital Objects at the V&A, Histories and New Acquisitions.” Born Digital Cultural Heritage Conference, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, November 2023.
“Unpacking Mildred Constantine’s 1941 Latin America in Posters Exhibition: State Propaganda and the Limits of Curatorial Intent.” Design History Society Annual Conference: Displaying Design: History, Criticism and Curatorial Discourses, September 2023.
2022
“Old News, New Methods: Addressing Digital Material Culture through 19th Century Sensationalist Papers and 21st Century Fake News Websites.” Material Culture Caucus, American Studies Association Conference, November 2022.
“Rethinking Research Methods for Digital Material Culture.” Design History Society Conference: Design & Transience, September 2022.
2021
“A Disorderly Archive.” Design History Society Conference: Memory Full, September 2021.
“Design in Quarantine: Past, Present and Post-COVID Futures.” Pandemic Perspectives, April 2021. Watch the video on YouTube.
“A Disorderly Archive.” Coalition of Masters Scholars of Material Culture ‘Pandemic Perspectives’, April 2021. Watch the video on YouTube.
2020
“Design in Quarantine.” Design History Society Student Forum, October 2020. Watch the video on YouTube.