Research Topic
I am a fourth-year doctoral student in History of Art at St John’s College. My thesis focuses on visual representations of race and ecology made in Martinique as vital sites in which French national identity was negotiated in the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, a period in which the definition of being, and not being, French was redefined. It looks at understudied visual material of lesser-known or completely unknown, sometimes “amateur”, artists alongside work of a canonical artist like Paul Gauguin. By looking at such artists in a relational, non-hierarchical way, her research navigates the multitude of chromatic explorations done to grapple and reassert racial and environmental control of Martinique in the decades following the 1848 abolition of slavery. The thesis uses colour (as a pigment, a racial marker and visual effect) as the main prism through which engage with the work and the questions they ask. More broadly, I am interested in relations and exchanges across global boundaries, ways of (sight)seeing, the production of goods as well as the material and sensory worlds of the imperial experience.
I am a current RHS Marshall Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. I hold a Masters of Arts (Honours) in History of Art from the University of St Andrews (2018) and a MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of Oxford, St Cross College (2020). My studies have been generously supported by Knud Højgaards Fond, Augustinus Fonden, St John's College, The Danish Academy in Rome, the Beit Fund and Funds for Women Graduates.
Supervisor: Professor Alastair Wright
