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About Me

I am a Lecturer in British Art at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

I engage in teaching and research into British art of the early modern period (c.1550-1750), with a particular interest in the interplay between printed and painted images, propaganda and polemic across the seventeenth century. My monograph Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (2008) redresses an established art historical bias privileging genres such as elite portraiture over printed media, and challenges the presence of a pervasive ‘iconophobia’ in post-Reformation English culture.

I’m currently working on two projects:

• the artistic activities and networking of the late seventeenth-century group of independently-wealthy gentlemen known as the York Virtuosi
• the role of artists and patrons in Britain during the 1650s, a period traditionally understood as artistically limited and culturally compromised

Recent Publications

“”This Ingenious young Gent and excellent artist”: William Lodge (1649-1689) and the York Virtuosi’ in Mark Hallett, Nigel Llewelyn and Martin Myrone (eds.), Court, Country, City: Studies in British Art, Volume 24 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2016).

‘Graphic satire and the printed image in Shakespeare’s London’ in Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

‘Text and image: William Marshall’s frontispiece to the “Eikon Basilike” (1649)’ in Geoff Kemp (ed.), Censorship Moments: Reading Censorship Texts (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

‘Images, representation, and counter-representation’ in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Vol.1: Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

‘Artful ambivalence? Picturing Charles I during the Interregnum’ in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism During the Interregnum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

‘The devil’s bloodhound: Roger L’Estrange caricatured’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation (Ashgate Press, 2010).

Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008).

Media Coverage

Social Media

Country Focus

England, Scotland, British Isles

Expertise by Geography

British Isles, England

Expertise by Chronology

17th century

Expertise by Topic

Art & Architectural History, Material Culture, Politics