Victoria Powell (1996)

Dr V Powell, PhD (1996) aged 49. Victoria (Vic) Powell was born in Royston, the daughter of Elizabeth and William Powell, a barrister who later became the MP for Corby. Vic was the middle of three sisters, born two years after her elder sister Sophie, and two years before Natasha, who from a young age became her closest friend and confidante, a bond that lasted throughout her life.

Vic attended the Perse School for Girls before coming up to Queens’ in 1996 to read Classics, later switching to History of Art. As a student she was a keen footballer, secretary of the Women’s Hockey Club, as well as cementing her devotion to 1980s pop. Her confident and forthright style was on display right from freshers week, when she looked her next-door-but-one neighbour on her Cripps staircase directly in the eye and said ‘You know when you first meet some people, you can just tell you’re never going to be friends with them?’ (he soon became a great lifelong friend).

After graduating in 1999, Vic moved to London and began a career centred on her love of art, working for Britart, an online art gallery, and The Cogency, an arts marketing company. In the mid-2000s, she returned to academic study and completed her Masters in the History of Design at the Royal College of Art in 2008. In the years that followed she lectured on art, design, critical and historical studies at a range of institutions including the University of the Arts London and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, as well as regularly teaching overseas students visiting the UK. Vic’s passion for her material made her an excellent and engaging teacher.

From 2009 onwards, Vic had also embarked on her ‘labour of love’, researching her doctoral thesis in the Department of History at Birkbeck, University of London, with her PhD awarded in 2017. Her research focused on the life of the actor Henry Irving, who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most respected men in 19th century society, as a means of re-examining social mobility in Victorian Britain. Vic was an enthusiastic advocate for her claims about the importance of bodily practices and behaviour in how Victorians interpreted status, the centrality of the notions of ‘the polite and the vulgar’, and the necessity of a long process of acculturation in polite society for upward mobility.

In 2012, Vic met her future wife, Thomasina Woolley. In 2016, they moved to Bristol with Thomasina’s children Isaac and Elliot, to whom Vic became a nurturing step-parent. They created a warm, welcoming and lively family home, full of laughter, affection and Vic’s unmistakable sense of style. The move outside of London enabled Vic to deepen her engagement with the natural world, and in addition to her continuing work as a lecturer, she became the doting owner of her beloved Peggy, a Schnauzer–Westie cross, and a gardener at historic Thornbury Castle, where she helped develop the kitchen garden into a flourishing, productive space, bringing together her appreciation of history and beauty with the pleasure of growing things. Vic’s love of art was not left behind, and in 2021, she founded The Gallery Companion, a newsletter and podcast discussing ‘all the messy, complicated stuff that artists explore and question in their work’, which was shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023.

Vic died of leukaemia in Bristol in July 2026. Her colleagues, students, readers and listeners will remember her as a passionate explorer and interpreter of art, design, society and nature. Unafraid to speak her mind, endlessly curious about the world and fiercely loyal to those she loved, Vic was entirely and unmistakably herself. Her humour, warmth and extraordinary force of personality will be deeply missed by her family and many friends.  

Written by Juliet Michaelson (1997).