Barbara Penner's research covers a range of subjects: nineteenth-century commercial architecture (hotels and department stores); twentieth-century tourist destinations (honeymoon resorts); domestic spaces and technologies (bathrooms and kitchens); and urban infrastructure, including housing. Her primary research question is how seemingly everyday spaces and building types enable the formation of particular social and cultural identities and promote social inclusion or its opposite. Her work is interdisciplinary and intersectional, typically drawing on work from anthropology, literary theory, history, STS and cultural studies.

Barbara is author of Bathroom (Reaktion, 2013; Awarded RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding University-Located Research 2014) and Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America (UPNE, 2009). Among others, she is co-editor of Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression (2017), Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009) and Gender Space Architecture (2000). In addition, she has published twenty book chapters and over thirty journal articles. Her research is further disseminated through international, national, academic and public lectures, commissioned essays, and teaching.

Barbara has received a variety of fellowships and awards, including from The Leverhulme Trust, The Clark Art Institute, Cornell University, the Winterthur Museum and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History. She has recently concluded a major Humanities in the European Research Area Joint Research Programme grant, Printing the Past: Architecture, Print Culture, and Uses of the Past in Modern Europe, led by the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, with partners from digital media lab Factum Arte, Ghent University, Leiden University, Musée d’Orsay, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. (http://priarc.aho.no) The outcome of the UCL team’s research, the edited book Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects will be out soon (Reaktion, 2021).

Barbara has also made several contributions to the Future Archive, sponsored by The Graham Foundation in association with Places, to select and make key architectural writings available digitally. Her first selection was a piece by the critic and historian Reyner Banham; the second was an essay by the houser, Catherine Bauer. Partially on the basis of this last contribution, in 2020, University of Minnesota Press reprinted Bauer’s long out-of-print classic Modern Housing (1934) for which Barbara wrote a foreword. This is also the subject of a short film produced as part of the “In Search of Europe” series by UCL European Institute.

Barbara's current book project, “Subject to Design: Social Science in the Home”, studies how social scientific research into user behaviour has shaped Anglo-American homes in the 20th and 21st centuries. By exploring disciplines from home economics to ergonomics to ethnographic consumer studies, it suggests that this research has shaped the design of home spaces, domestic technologies, and home lives in pervasive but rarely acknowledged ways. Barbara was awarded the 2014-5 Cornell Dean’s Fellowship to conduct archival research into one important case study, the celebrated Cornell Kitchen (1950-53), an exemplary ergonomic project that brought together a multidisciplinary team of home engineers, architects, and social scientists to redesign kitchen space. This research was published as an article in Technology & Culture (January 2018).