Imagining Britain: Postgraduate and Early Career Research in British and Irish Art

Dr Isobel Muir is Assistant Curator, 19th Century British Art at Tate. Her research has previously focused on the activities of Jewish women in the London art world in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as art dealers and professional curators operating in a predominantly male field. During her PhD research, she discovered that the National Gallery played an important role in the careers of several Jewish women, who attempted to shape its collecting practices and establish themselves within its walls and without. She worked on a research project relating to the National Gallery’s first female curator in the 1940s and is a member of the Women and the Arts Forum and the British Art Network. 

Dr Ella Nixon specialises in twentieth-century British art. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at The Women’s Art Collection (Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge) and a research assistant at Birmingham University and Northumbria University, and has previously been a research associate at the Arts Council Collection. Her doctoral thesis examined the representation of women artists in regional art galleries, in collaboration with the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Grace is an AHRC-CHASE funded PhD student at the Courtauld Institute of Art, supervised by Dr Esther Chadwick and Dr Kyle Leyden. Her research focuses on land, landscapes, and geographies of early modern Ireland within the wider imperial Atlantic world, across a range of media, as reflections and constructions of transcultural colonial encounters, ideologies, identities, and processes. Before starting her PhD, Grace worked as an Assistant Curator of Ceramics and Glass at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and as the Curatorial Assistant at the Chitra Collection. 

Eleanor Stephenson is a Research Curator at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, and a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, where she recently completed her PhD on the visual and material culture of early British Jamaica. She has published on the art and science of the British Empire with the University of Wales Press, Princeton University Press, and the Huntington Library Quarterly, and curated related exhibitions at the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Science Museum, and the Watts Gallery. 

Méabh Scahill is an incoming PhD student researching the social and cultural history of Trinity East, a former industrial site in Dublin’s dockland’s now owned by the University of Dublin. (As of June 8th!) Méabh completed an MPhil in architecture and urban studies at the University of Cambridge, researching the early history of Dublin Zoo. She is broadly interested in Irish urban history, in particular connections with Britain and the wider empire in the nineteenth century. 

Abigail Spencer is a PhD student at the Courtauld Institute of Art, funded by the Manton Scholarship for Doctoral Research on British and Irish Art. Her research analyses the ways in which female bodies were visually appropriated to imperial aims in late-eighteenth-century Britain, with a particular interest in the material manifestations of this process in architectural culture and political prints. She is also working with several other researchers on a project at Glastonbury Abbey about the historical reception and interpretation of Mary Magdalene in Britain. Prior to beginning her PhD, Abigail completed both her BA and MA at the Courtauld, receiving the Courtauld Award for Outstanding Achievement for her MA dissertation exploring sympathy and the maternal image in the visual culture of abolitionism. Outside of academic research she works for the Athena Art Foundation to organise events with contemporary artists and curators. 

Sarah Hutcheson (she/they) recently finished a PhD in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urbanism at Harvard University, with a focus on the political meanings of architecture in early modern Britain and the British Empire. Sarah’s dissertation research explores architecture, the royal body, and the body politic under Charles II. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Shaheen is a third-year doctoral candidate in Architectural History at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture. Her work focuses on the maritime infrastructures of the transatlantic slave trade throughout the eighteenth century, on the Atlantic periphery and at sea. She centers the gaps in history: erased narratives, liminal spaces, and lost structure types. 

Christina Childs is a CHASE-funded PhD researcher at the Courtauld Institute, focusing on Surrealism, psychoanalysis and politics in the twentieth century. Her thesis, Covert Operations and Cultural Warfare: British Surrealism, Propaganda and Surveillance 1936-1960, centres on the relationship between the British Surrealist group and government propaganda, surveillance and cultural warfare projects.

Ed Kettleborough is a PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of Bristol and Chair of the Association for Art History’s Committee for Early Career Researchers. His doctoral research is sponsored by the SWW DTP consortium of the AHRC and co-supervised at the University of Exeter. Reconsidering the generation of artists who emerged from the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s, Ed’s thesis seeks to move beyond the conceptualisation of their work as “British Pop” to reveal occluded contexts and meanings. His writing has appeared in print with Visual Culture in Britain and Art History. 

Amber Butchart is a CHASE-funded practice-based PhD researcher at the Centre for Curatorial Studies, University of Essex. Her research considers textiles as propaganda in both discursive and material contexts, and how the curation of propaganda objects involves a critical engagement with the intersecting space they occupy between multiple disciplines and dynamics. Her doctoral outputs include ‘The Fabric of Democracy: Propaganda Textiles from the French Revolution to Brexit’ at the Fashion & Textile Museum in London, and ‘The Synthetic Revolution’ for the British Textile Biennial in Lancashire, which considered the development of synthetic fabrics as a technology of Cold War propaganda.