Penny Sparke is a British writer and academic specialising in the history of design.

She studied French Literature at Sussex University between 1967 and 1971 and completed her PhD in Design History in 1975. She taught Design History at Brighton Polytechnic (now The University of Brighton

University of Brighton

The University of Brighton is an English university of the United Kingdom, with a community of over 23,000 students and 2,600 staff based on campuses in Brighton, Eastbourne and Hastings. It has one of the best teaching quality ratings in the UK and a strong research record, factors which...

) until 1982 and at the Royal College of Art

Royal College of Art

The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...

 in London between 1982 and 1999.

Sparke has written 15 books about Twentieth-Century Design. She has also curated a number of exhibitions, including The Plastics Age at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Victoria and Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...

 in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 in 1990. Since 1999 she has also been a Professor of Design History at Kingston University

Kingston University

Kingston University is a public research university located in Kingston upon Thames, southwest London, United Kingdom. It was originally founded in 1899 as Kingston Technical Institute, a polytechnic, and became a university in 1992....

, London. In 2007 Penny Sparke worked as a consultant for Pyrex

Pyrex

Pyrex is a brand name for glassware, introduced by Corning Incorporated in 1915.Originally, Pyrex was made from borosilicate glass. In the 1940s the composition was changed for some products to tempered soda-lime glass, which is the most common form of glass used in glass bakeware in the US and has...

 helping with the communication project for their new cookware range designed by George Sowden

George Sowden

George J. Sowden was born in Leeds, UK in 1942. He studied architecture at Gloucestershire College of Art in the 1960s. He moved to Milano in 1970 where he started working with Ettore Sottsass and Olivetti...

.