Awardees | 2025
- Viccy Coltman
Viccy is professor of eighteenth-century history of art at the University of Edinburgh and a distinguished scholar in the field of material culture—what she affectionately terms “knick-knack” history. She is the author of three monographs and the editor of two further volumes, and currently leads an exciting new book series with Edinburgh University Press, Visual and Material Cultures of Scotland. While Viccy’s research focuses on Scotland from the Jacobite risings through to Walter Scott, her work consistently reaches beyond North Britain to explore the role of Scots in London, in Europe, and across the expanding British Empire. She is particularly attuned to the ways visual and material culture articulate identity, power, and mobility. During her time at the YCBA, she will be working on her current book project, a cultural history of Scottish officers and Highland regiments during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815).
- Zoë Dostal
Zoë Dostal is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Early Modern European Art and Architecture at Amherst College. She completed her PhD at Columbia University in 2024 with the dissertation “Rope, Linen, Thread: Gender, Labor, and the Textile Industry in Eighteenth-Century British Art.” This project was supported by a Kress Institutional Fellowship at The Courtauld Institute of Art (2022–2024), the Huntington Library, the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. Zoë has a BA in art history from Vassar College and an MA from The Courtauld Institute, and she has held curatorial internships at The Courtauld Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
During her time at the YCBA, Zoë will be working on her book project, The Fabric of British Art. The book reframes eighteenth-century British art as a history of textiles to reveal how manufacturing, imperialism, and the visual arts were materially and ideologically enmeshed processes. Moving from roughly 1670 to 1845, she addresses the hemp rope that models used to pose for life drawing, the coarse linen canvas supports of oil paintings, the worsted thread of metropolitan embroidery exhibitions, and the recycled remnants of these textiles in watercolorists’ paper. Over these four chapters, she recasts the drawings, paintings, and prints of canonical artists as products of women’s labor in the hemp, flax, and wool industries.
- Luke Gartlan
Luke is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. His research and teaching concerns modern visual practices in the global nineteenth century, particularly with regard to histories and theories of photography; Japanese modern art, its institutions and intermedial practices; Orientalism and cross-cultural art; and Art of the Habsburg Empire. These interests informed his book A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography (Brill, 2016), which was awarded the Josef Kreiner Prize for International Japanese Studies. Luke has co-edited two volumes: with Roberta Wue, Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan (Routledge, 2017); and with Ali Behdad, Photography's Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation (Getty, 2013). For six years, Luke has served as editor-in-chief of the international quarterly journal History of Photography, for which he also guest edited a special issue on photography in nineteenth-century Japan.
At the YCBA, Luke will be working on his project, Empire on Paper: St Andrews and the Global Networks of Early Victorian Photography.
How do scholars interrogate the role of empire in the vast archives of British provincial photography? St Andrews has long been recognized for its prominence in the early history of photography. Yet the account of a small university town in which a circle of residents practiced photography has emphasized narratives of provincial isolation and local heritage. In contrast, this project will investigate the entangled colonial histories of St Andrews to reconsider local uses of photography in their global contexts, uncovering a network of historical associations that challenge the cultural politics of the “provincial” often associated with rural and small-town photographic archives in Britain. Two premises underpin this project: firstly, that St Andrews was a hotbed of early photography and imperial involvement, and that these are embedded, interconnected histories; and secondly, that the visual codes and connections to empire in the photography of St Andrews have been overlooked in the interests of an unproblematic narrative of local history and heritage. Taking five prominent local families as case studies, Luke argues that the idea of provincial photography does not exist in opposition to the photography of overseas colonies. Rather, the historical realities of empire constituted and structured the family photograph albums of nineteenth-century St Andrews.
- Libby Horsfield
Libby Horsfield is a PhD researcher in the History of Art Department at Birkbeck University, London. Working in partnership with English Heritage, she is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through a Collaborative Doctoral Award. Her research explores nineteenth-century women’s non-professional art and the country house as a space for creativity. In particular, she focuses on the Neville family of Audley End House in Essex, an English Heritage property. Libby has spoken at several conferences and most recently presented to the staff and volunteers of Audley End on her work.
Libby’s project seeks to locate and analyze examples of women’s non-professional artworks in the YCBA collection. ‘Amateur’ art has long been perceived as derivative and of poor quality. Aside from a select few figures, like Mary Delany, women’s non-professional artistic efforts have been particularly undervalued in scholarship, being both ‘amateur’ and by a woman. Libby’s research aims to rectify this by exploring the processes and motivations behind women’s creative endeavors, focusing on their everyday encounters with art. Drawing on sources which have received little academic attention, Libby will be analyzing albums held at the YCBA made by women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most important to her research will be the collection of ten family sketchbooks associated with Mary Leighton. These albums – containing pieces by Leighton and her children – present a unique opportunity to investigate women’s cross-generational artistic practices. Other sources will include Anne Rushout’s sketchbooks of country houses, Ellen Fenton’s illustrated diaries of trips to Boulogne-sur-Mer, and the Pease family archive. Through her research, Libby will demonstrate how art was bound into the social and emotional lives of both individuals and families in this period, making an exploration of this material well overdue.
- Emma Pearce
Emma Pearce is an early career art historian who holds degrees in History of Art from the University of York (BA) and the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA). She has recently completed her PhD in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, where her thesis focused on the colonial connections and legacies of tartan during the long eighteenth century. For the past academic year, she has held a lecturing position at Glasgow School of Art, and has previously taught at the Edinburgh College of Art. Her research specialisms lie in painting, print culture, and fashion and textile history, and she is broadly interested in topics surrounding identity, colonialism, and the body in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her future postdoctoral research focuses on the relationship between whiteness, masculinity, and empire through material culture made from animal matter.
During her residential fellowship at the YCBA, Emma will be looking in detail at one object in the YCBA’s collection: a tiny watercolor from the late eighteenth century of two seamstresses on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts by the artist William Hay. She is working on an article project that hopes to contextualize Hay’s work within broader art histories of Caribbean watercolor painting of the late eighteenth century, as well as look further into the provenance of the piece. In addition to this, the project aims to also consider the women depicted. Although it is unlikely that these two seamstresses will be able to be identified by name, it is still possible to speculate on their identities and situate their clothing within a wider network of wearable goods in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Emma’s research hopes to elucidate the role of these two women as seamstresses in the capital city of St. Kitts at the turn of the eighteenth century, and their role as consumers and producers of global goods. In doing so, the article ultimately hopes to contribute to the literature on the material literacy and artistic skills of women of color across the colonial Caribbean.
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