Awardees | 2025

Olivia Armandroff

As a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Southern California, Olivia Armandroff concentrates on twentieth-century American art, with research interests that include the proliferation and exchange of imagery, instances of collaborative production, and questions of space and place in natural and built environments. Her dissertation, “Volcanic Matter: Land Formation and Artistic Creation,” has received support from the Smithsonian Institution, the Amon Carter Museum, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Decorative Arts Trust, among other institutions. She earned a B.A. in the History of Art and History from Yale University and an M.A. in American Material Culture from the Winterthur Program and has held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Princeton University Art Museum. Her peer-reviewed publications can be found in Winterthur Portfolio, Journal of Design History, Italian Modern Art, and Woman’s Art Journal.  

This dissertation grapples with the ways Hawaiʻi’s volcanoes, and the region’s unique geological conditions, galvanized artistic production. While Hawaiʻi has frequently been omitted from art historical discourse, nineteenth century, Euro-American artists arriving at Kīlauea, Hawaiʻi’s most active volcano, were working in a tradition more widely recognized in the scholarly canon. They seized upon compositional standards normalized in the previous century at Vesuvius by British artists such as Joseph Wright of Derby by showing the erupting volcano in nocturnal views that highlighted the red heat of swirling and spattering lava. Taking a long view of history, I extend my visual comparison beyond artists enmeshed in the sublime landscape tradition of the nineteenth century, studying how William Hamilton’s eighteenth-century rock studies of Vesuvius in the Campi Phlegraei relate to the work of late-twentieth-century modernists at Kīlauea such as photographer Aaron Siskind who was driven by a similar impulse to understand the entirety of a volcano through its constituent parts. The parallels between these hyper-local artist circles demonstrate a truly global network of exchange, connecting transatlantic routes of trade to transpacific ones. British imperial views of Pacific volcanoes destabilize presumptions about a one-directional path of influence, revealing the ways expeditionary practices could have encouraged an exoticizing fascination with geological processes and incited Britain’s popular fascination with volcanoes closer to home. 

Sarah Carter

Sarah Carter specializes in British art and material culture of the long eighteenth century with an emphasis on histories of collecting, antiquarianism, and the British empire in South Asia. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Fonds de Recherche du Québec (FRQSC), the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Huntington Library. Her work has appeared in RACAR, Lumen, and Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly and has received awards from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS), the Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC) and the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA). Sarah has several journal articles forthcoming including in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Pegasus, and Oxford Art Journal. She is currently working on two book projects, Art and Eros in the British Enlightenment and “Empire Follows Art”: Trafficking Culture in Imperial Britain and South Asia, 1780–1880.

In 1835, Letitia Elizabeth Landon questioned the relationship between art and empire in the poem “The Caves of Elephanta.” Hindu temples, she surmised, when stripped of their priests and votaries, existed in an epistemic void. “What know we of them? Nothing—there they stand, / Gloomy as night, inscrutable as fate.” That the emptiness now haunting these sacred spaces was a consequence of British occupation is implicit and contested (Cope 2019), a tension that acts as a poignant reminder that imperialism cast a long shadow on both South Asian and British cultures. Landon, after all, was in the company of many artists and writers thinking about architectural landscapes remote from their lived experience. But what drove this interest in distant cultural heritage and the deleterious effects of empire? To answer this question, I reconsider the art and antiquarianism of Scottish artist and East India Company servant James Forbes (1749–1819) and Scottish artist James Wales (1747–1795). My project argues that the images and ideas they circulated not only contributed to an emerging discourse on cultural heritage but also prompted reflection on the cultural costs of British imperial ambition—a theme modelled in the Forbes and Wales archives in the collection of the YCBA. 

Christine Checinska

Christine Checinska is an artist, designer, curator and storyteller. She is the V&A’s Senior Curator of Africa and Diaspora Textiles and Fashion, and Lead Curator of the international touring exhibition Africa Fashion. She served on the Costume Institute at the Met’s Advisory Committee for the 2025 show Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. She serves on the boards of the British Textile Biennial and the Textile Society of America, and is a member of the Visual Art Committee at St Paul’s Cathedral, London.

Christine exhibited work in the group show The Missing Thread, Somerset House, London, 2023–2024. She was a co-curator of Makers Eye: Stories of Craft, Crafts Council Gallery, London, 2021. Her recent publications include "Material Practices of Caribbean Artists Throughout the Diaspora," in Crafting Kinship: A Visual Journal of Black Caribbean Makers, Marlene Barnett (ed.), 2024. She is a Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. 

Jean Marie Christensen

Jean Marie Christensen is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Southern Methodist University. She received her Bachelor of Arts in History, minoring in Art History, from Oklahoma State University. She earned her Master of Arts in History from The University of Tulsa where she completed her thesis on Queen Anne as princess and rival to the sitting monarchies in the late seventeenth century England. In addition to presenting her research at domestic and international conferences, her work has been supported by several fellowships from the Lewis Walpole Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and UCLA’s Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. Part of her dissertation on Henry VIII’s portraiture by Hans Holbein the Younger was published in Renaissance Studies in 2022. An essay on Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII’s wives is in progress for an edited volume on the changing body in early modernity.  

Her on-going doctoral dissertation, “Bodies of the Crown: Kinship, Health, and the Construction of the Royal Body in Early Modern English Portraiture” argues that the portrait becomes not a representation of a singular identity, but the location where cultural expectations and anxieties about the human body and the body politic are negotiated in the interest of monarchical authority. Her dissertation examines three English royal bodies, the artistic techniques, and social expectations that conditioned their portraiture. Hans Holbein the Younger’s portraits of Henry VIII and Charles I’s imagery by Anthony van Dyck fabricate royal bodies by using replication and depictions of the royal court to replace the monarchs’ disabilities with authoritative representations. The final case study examines how Queen Anne’s portraits by Godfrey Kneller, and his engravers, are influenced by contemporary female portraiture’s visualization of the beauty standard found in treatises. Anne’s portraits are not the likeness of her immobility and obesity, but are the constructed royal body produced by her artists and society. Anne’s case demonstrates that gender is a critical factor in royal portrait construction. The idealized royal body, even by the eighteenth century, was male, therefore relegating Anne’s authority as contingent upon perceptions of female beauty.  

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.

Carol Jacobi

Carol Jacobi  is Curator of British Art 1850–1915 at Tate Britain, but works across periods including modern and contemporary art, with a commitment to de-centering. She has a PhD in Art History and MA Nineteenth-century English Literature (University of London), MA in Conservation of Oil Paintings (University of Northumbria), a Leverhulme Fellowship at the National Portrait Gallery and has taught at the Courtauld Institute and elsewhere. Carol is lead on James McNeill Whistler and the international research project Whistler’s Finish. Past exhibitions include The Rossettis, Bill Brandt, Van Gogh and Britain and Salt and Silver, Early Photography (Tate Britain); Ophelia (Shanghai); Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate (Canberra, Milan, Budapest); William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision; Love and Desire (Toronto, Minneapolis, Manchester). She publishes and broadcasts widely on Victorian and twentieth century art with special interest in under and mis-represented subjects, including monographs on William Holman Hunt and Isabel Rawsthorne.

Carol is particularly interested in the challenge and opportunities for historic curators of reframing British art for twenty-first century audiences. Her residence will take advantage of the library and collection at YCBA to advance research for the major exhibition James McNeill Whistler at Tate Britain and Van Gogh Museum. Her time will be spent developing fresh discoveries and narratives to fulfill Tate's stated values: ‘artistically adventurous, culturally inclusive and open, bold, rigorous and kind’. The exhibition considers this nomadic American artist in the context of the prospects and conflicts of a fast-changing, industrial, newly global world and reassesses interchanges between cultures. It builds on recent trends to highlight the working-class people and places with which Whistler was often most comfortable, especially the working woman who became collaborators, friends and partners. It reassesses Whistler’s self-fashioning and 'wit' and reflects on complex connections between his social and aesthetic defiance. The exhibition explores new digital and immersive display strategies, such as virtual reality, but, in this age of screens, it foregrounds the physical work of art. Whistler’s evolution of theories and practice of abstraction are explored through the very original methods by which he brought them about and it is hoped the exhibition will engage creatives of all kinds. 

Matthew Johnson

Matthew Johnson is Kenneth Burgess Professor and Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University.  He works on the archaeology and history of England in its British and northern Atlantic context.  He has written six books on a range of themes, including castles, traditional houses, landscape, and an archaeology of capitalism. He has also written more widely on archaeological theory, understanding medieval and historical archaeology, and archaeology in its cultural context.  

He most recently worked ‘in the field’ at Bodiam Castle and nearby landscapes in southeastern England. The collaborative project explored the castle and its surroundings as a living landscape of people of different social classes and identities.  Places like Bodiam are best understood as a series of scales, ranging from the action of washing hands in the chapel piscina through to their setting within global and postcolonial networks.  

Matthew has held visiting fellowships and positions at UC-Berkeley, Heidelberg, UCLA, Flinders, Cambridge, and the University of Pennsylvania. After a PhD at Cambridge and posts at Sheffield, Durham and Southampton, he moved across the Atlantic in 2011 to Northwestern.

He is writing a wide-ranging book which explores the buildings, landscapes and settlements of the English in the northern Atlantic. The book ranges across the second millennium CE and beyond.  It traces the prehistory of material practices and locations—houses, fields, roads, villages, towns—that led to patterns of English settlement in the New World. These practices and locations can be traced not just to early modern England and its neighbors, leading to the conception and creation of "Britain," but back to the early Middle Ages and indeed back in time. 

Emma Luisa Cahill Marrón

Emma Luisa Cahill Marrón has a PhD in Art History from the University of Murcia (2022, Cum Laude), where she is the International Outreach Coordinator in the Art, Power, and Gender Research Group. Her research focuses on the artistic patronage of Queen Katherine of Aragon in Renaissance Europe. She has published extensively on the artistic and cultural exchanges between Tudor England and Spain. In April 2022 she gave a conference in the Prado Museum focused on the portrait exchanges between these two monarchies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This research was awarded the 2022 BritishSpanish Society and Santander Universities UK Scholarship and the 2023 ARTES-CEEH Spanish PhD Scholarship. She participated in the first edition of The Female Perspective, the Prado’s trailblazing initiative to showcase women’s importance, writing about Anthonis Mor’s portrait of Mary I of England and her crucial role as a patron of the arts. 

The YCBA has a collection of miniatures of outstanding quality. This project focuses on three early examples, two entitled Portrait of an Unknown Lady dated around 1535, attributed to Flemish artists Lucas Horenbout and Jean Clouet. The third one, Portrait of a man, probably Sir George Carew, was painted around 1540 and it is attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger. There is documentary evidence of the presence of a woman portraitist in the service of the Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon in 1520. The following year, Albrecht Dürer praised the quality of Susanna Horenbout’s artistry in Antwerp when she was likely working as an artistic agent for Queen Katherine. This makes Susanna Horenbout the main candidate for rendering the first miniatures in England for the marriage of Princess Mary with her cousin Emperor Charles V sealed in 1522. Susanna was also sent as a diplomat by the King of England to bring Anna of Cleves to the Tudor court when Holbein rendered his picture of the bride now in the Louvre Museum. This project aims to bring light to the fact that Susanna and Holbein collaborated in a royal workshop under the patronage of Queen Katherine of Aragon. 

Morna O'Neill 

Morna O'Neill is professor of art history in the Department of Art at Wake Forest University, where she teaches courses in eighteenth and nineteenth-century European art and the history of photography.  Her scholarship addresses the conjunction of art, design, and politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is the author of Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics (Yale University Press, 2011), which won the Historians of British Art Book Prize for Best Book, and Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893–1915, published in 2018 by Yale. She is co-founder and co-editor (with Anne Nellis Richter and Melinda McCurdy) of “Home Subjects,” a digital humanities working group dedicated to the display of art in the private interior in Britain (http://www.homesubjects.org/).  Her current research project examines the incorporation of industrial materials and modes of making into British art in the decades before the Great Exhibition of 1851.

continue work on my current book project Art and Brutality: British Art and Industrial Manufacture, 1820-1851. This study aims to elucidate early attempts to understand the connections between art and industry, from the introduction of steel plate engraving in 1820 to the opening of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London in 1851. Her project will provide a more complete picture of the ways in which artists grappled with the changes in art and artistic practice wrought by the technological developments of the industrial revolution. In so doing, it will revise the current understanding of the artistic and ideological divides between “art” and “manufacture” in the decades before the Great Exhibition.  While at the Center, she will focus on the printed guides and handbooks to the Great Exhibition. 

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.

Elisabeth (Lizzie) Rivard

Elisabeth (Lizzie) Rivard is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Virginia. She earned her BA at Northwestern University and her MA at Williams College. Her dissertation examines the relationship between fine art and the army and maritime professions in eighteenth-century Britain. Her work has been supported by the UCLA Clark Library, Center for 17th-&18th-Century Studies, and the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. She is also the Barringer-Lindner Curatorial Fellow at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, and is currently organizing an exhibition related to Thomas Jefferson and southern France.

Damiët Schneeweisz

Damiët Schneeweisz is Assistant Curator of Paintings and Drawings at the V&A and a PhD Candidate at the Courtauld, where she specializes in European and Atlantic visual culture, with a focus on portraiture, mobility, and empire. Her CHASE AHRC-funded dissertation traces histories of the portrait miniature in the circum-Atlantic Caribbean. Prior to joining the Courtauld, she was the Johan Huizinga Fellow at the Rijksmuseum. Damiët has a BA (Hons, Summa Cum Laude) from Leiden University College and an MA (High Distinction) from the NTU CCA Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore as well as from The Courtauld, and her work has been supported by amongst others Yale, the Paul Mellon Centre, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. She is the author of a forthcoming new volume on the history of the miniature with Thames & Hudson. 

During her time at the YCBA, Damiët will be working on the completion of her PhD dissertation. Across four chapters, each devoted to a distinct Caribbean locale—Bermuda and the British Caribbean (1700–1770); Suriname (1770–1800); Martinique and the Antilles (1800–1820); and the revolutionary courts of Haiti and Brazil (1810-1835)—the thesis tracks the emergence and spread of the portrait miniature in the circum-Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century. Moving the miniature from the margins to the center of art historic analysis, this critical study reveals how the miniature prompted the widespread movement of artists and became entangled with the economic, political, and social environs of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It recasts earlier readings of the miniature’s close relationship to amulets with a cross-cultural comparison of the place of affect and agency in this new Atlantic context. 

Ellen Smith

Ellen Smith is currently an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, but she will be taking up a three-year Simon Research Fellowship at the University of Manchester from October 2025. She was awarded her PhD in July 2023 at the University of Leicester, undertaken with an Arts and Humanities Research Council studentship. Since her PhD, she has been writing her first monograph, which explores the social and cultural experiences of writing in colonial South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed history journals such as Gender & History (winner of the Royal Historical Society’s 2024 Alexander Prize), the Journal of British Studies, and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. She is also the lead editor of the fourth volume, ‘Empire, Nation, Globe’, of a series of books on the history of nineteenth-century communications, coming out in 2026.

Her work at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) will contribute to her second major research project, ‘Colonial Family Archives: Communities of Feeling and Historical Consciousness, 1858-1962’. It will address colonial family archives, the emotions they evoke and how family archiving has historically fed into the development of public historical consciousness. Ellen will be consulting rare books and manuscripts including scrapbooks, commonplace books, family records, albums, prints and drawings and correspondence, written by individuals with connections to or experience of traveling to colonial South Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her first project explored "imperial letters," the correspondence that British families wrote to, from and within India and Ceylon (now, Sri Lanka), asking how the labour involved in writing letters, intersected with the politics of empire. Her research at the YCBA will extend this focus to think about how the archival materials (textual, material, artistic) that colonial families produced have shaped narratives of national history, identity and belonging, through cross-generational engagement over time. Crucially, in revealing how processes of archival production are sustained by emotional drives, such as shame or nostalgia, it identifies how different kinds of affective relationship with the past yield political capital and influence. 

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