My research interests lie in early modern and late medieval art, spanning Germany, the Low Countries, France, Italy and England. I currently specialise in premodern image theory and connections between art, anthropology and law. I have worked as a curator of paintings in the UK and US, and I also study modernist historiographies and theories of art.
‘Renaissance Image Rights', my new research project, explores the legal dimensions of premodern bodily identity and representation. It considers how images of individuals have had a long history of lawful significance, dating at least to the Roman ‘right to representations’. I have recently given talks on the medieval resistance to portraiture and the early modern revival of public statues.
My first book, on a different topic, is under contract with Oxford University Press. 'The Interior Scene in the Age of Van Eyck' looks at the introduction of the realistic domestic interior into Northern European painting culminating in the first portraits of individuals in rooms of their own. It studies this birth of the interior from a philosophical and historiographical angle – the significant genre, which continues to serve purposes in relating image-making and subjectivity right up to the present day.
I also specialise in seventeenth-century Italian, Flemish and British painting and the history of collecting. I rediscovered a major lost painting by Artemisia Gentileschi which I published in 2023 in collaboration with Royal Collection conservator Adelaide Izat: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f745c81f-35cc-4c0a-b85a-7b52778acb8b. I have published other articles on Artemisia's career, and I work on a long-term digital project on Charles I’s art collection.
I studied History of Art at the University of Cambridge (BA and MPhil), later becoming Assistant Curator at the Royal Collection Trust. I completed a PhD in early Netherlandish painting at the University of York. I have also held a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church, University of Oxford, a Curatorial Internship in the Paintings Department at the J. Paul Getty Museum, an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and an Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership Fellowship at the Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
