Meet the research team, from the University of York and St Paul’s Cathedral; the project design team from Add Two Digital; and the Advisory Board, made up of academics and curators from across the world.
Research Team
Simon Carter
Head of Collections, St Paul’s Cathedral
Simon Carter is Head of Collections at St Paul’s Cathedral where he is responsible for the management of the Cathedral’s historic collections, including access and engagement, conservation, documentation and development of the library, archives and object collections. Current projects include the refurbishment of the eighteenth-century library and display of its manuscript treasures; activities marking the tercentenary of the death of Grinling Gibbons; and a new guide to the painters and sculptors commemorated in St Paul’s. He has previously worked at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where he curated displays for the Medieval & Renaissance Galleries showcasing European art and culture from 300-1600. He was Assistant Keeper of Fine and Decorative Arts at The Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford, working with prints, drawings and paintings from the eighteenth century onwards; and prior to that, he worked for York Museum Service researching and documenting aspects of the collections in the Castle Museum, Yorkshire Museum and the City Art Gallery.
Professor Jason Edwards
Primary investigator
Department of History of Art, University of York
As well as focusing primarily on the sculptural pantheon at St Paul’s Cathedral, Jason works on British art in its global and imperial contexts; the art of Anglo-India; and British Orientalism in the period between 1760 and 1914. He has a number of interdisciplinary areas of interest, including queer theory; critical animal studies and vegan theory; and world systems and complex systems theory. Recent interests have also included fiber art and Victorian photography.
Dr Amy Harris
Research Associate
Department of History of Art, University of York/ St Paul’s Cathedral
Amy recently completed her AHRC-funded PhD on Francis Chantrey and the Chantrey Bequest between 1875 and 1917 with Tate and the University of York. It explored the underlying personal, political, and nationalistic agendas which formed a national collection of sculpture at the Tate Gallery. Her research centres on late-eighteenth- to early-twentieth-century British sculpture, the visual legacy of the British Empire, biography, national identity, and the history of collections.
Dr Richard Johns
Co-investigator
Department of History of Art, University of York
Richard’s research centres on art and visual culture in Britain during the long eighteenth century, with a special interest in grand-scale decorative history painting: previous publications include ‘“Those wilder sorts of Painting”: The Painted Interior in the Age of Antonio Verrio’ (2013) and a study of the painted inner dome of St Paul’s Cathedral (2009). He recently co-curated the exhibition Ruskin, Turner and the Storm Cloud (York Art Gallery and Abbot Hall Art Gallery, 2019). Before joining the Department of History of Art at York, he was a curator of art at the National Maritime Museum, London.
Dr Greg Sullivan
Research Associate
Department of History of Art, University of York/St Paul’s Cathedral
Greg is an art historian and curator specializing in British sculpture from the late-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. He co-wrote the Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660-1851 (Yale 2009) whilst a Research Fellow in the Research Department of the V&A (2000-6), and subsequently held curatorial posts at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and at Tate Britain. His publications include Sir Francis Chantrey and the Ashmolean Museum (2014), Fighting History (2015), and numerous articles on British sculpture, historiography and materials. In addition to cataloguing the monuments at St Paul’s, his current research interest is in the intersection of sculpture and the history of geology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Dr Marjorie Coughlan
Research Associate and Project Administrator
Department of History of Art, University of York
Marjorie is the YAHCs Administrator (York Art History Collaborations) at the Department of History of Art, University of York. She completed her PhD in 2013 on ‘William Giles (1830–1913): His Paintings and Photography’, and her chapter ‘The “Sacred Pastoral” as the Manifestation of Spirituality in the Work of Bishop William Giles’ was published in Transforming Christian Thought in the Visual Arts: Theology, Aesthetics, and Practice, edited by Sheona Beaumont and Madeleine Emerald Thiele, in 2021.
Design Team
Add Two Digital is the digital agency creating animations and interactive charts for the final project website:
Adam Frost
Content Director, Add Two Digital
Adam Frost was formerly head of data visualisation at the Guardian’s digital agency. He is now content director at Add Two, an agency specialising in data visualisation. His work has appeared on the Guardian, the New Statesman, Buzzfeed and elsewhere.
Tobias Sturt
Creative Director, Add Two Digital
Tobias Sturt was head of creative at the Guardian’s digital agency and is now creative director of Add Two. He has been working in digital storytelling for almost two decades using all kinds of media – from web to TV, games and infographics.
Jim Kynvin
Add Two Digital
Jim Kynvin is a senior designer at Add Two. He has created and developed concepts for a whole range of projects – clients have included the Royal Society, Wellcome Trust, London First and Nestle.
Sergio Gallardo
Add Two Digital
Sergio Gallardo has worked on infographics and web interactives for clients from children’s book publishers through to big private-sector corporations such as Google, Lloyd’s of London and Unilever. He has particular expertise in scientific and educational content, having worked on several graphics for the Lancet and the Royal Society.
Advisory Board
Dr Susanna Avery-Quash
Senior Research Curator in the History of Collecting, National Gallery, London
Susanna oversees the ‘Art and Religion’ research strand at the National Gallery. Her research and publications focus on the study of important private and public art collections, especially the National Gallery; trends in artistic taste, especially for the Old Masters; and the historical art market. Her most recent publications include The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, co-edited with Kate Reford (2019); Leonardo in Britain: Collections and Historical Reception, co-edited with Juliana Barone (2019); and London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780-1820, co-edited with Christian Huemer (2019). Susanna is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and at the University of Buckingham’s Humanities Research Institute.
View institutional profile:
Birkbeck
University of Buckingham
Professor Tim Barringer
Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University and Honorary Visiting Professor, University of York
Tim’s books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005), as well as numerous edited and co-edited volumes, including Colonialism, Art and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (with Tom Flynn) (1997), Art and the British Empire (with Geoff Quilley) (2009), Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds (2007) and Victorian Jamaica (with Wayne Modest). Most recently, in 2018, Tim was co-curator, with Elizabeth Kornhauser, of Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the National Gallery, London. A collection of essays, On the Viewing Platform: Perspectives on the Panorama (co-edited with Katie Trumpener) is forthcoming in November 2020.
Dr Julius Bryant
Keeper of Word and Image Department, Victoria and Albert Museum
As Keeper of Word and Image at the V&A, Julius is responsible for the paintings, prints, drawings and designs in the V&A collection, including the National Art Library and the Archive of Art and Design. He has published widely, and his books on British sculpture include Thomas Banks: Britain’s First Modern Sculptor (2005), Caro: Close Up (2012) and Magnificent Marble Statues: British Sculpture in the Mansion House (2013). Julius was also the curator of the major John Lockwood Kipling: Arts and Crafts in the Punjab and London exhibition at the V&A and its accompanying catalogue (2017).
Professor Joan Coutu
Department of Fine Arts, University of Waterloo, Canada
Joan is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Waterloo. Her research interests focus on the built environment in eighteenth-century Britain and early twentieth-century Canada with a particular interest in the role of aesthetics and memory in articulating space, power, politics, and social differentiation. Coutu has published two books, Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-century British Empire (2006) and Then and Now: Collecting and Classicism in Eighteenth-century England (2015), and has authored several essays on monuments, landscape design, and collecting in both eighteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century Canada, the opposite ends of empire.
Dr Petrina Dacres
Head of the Art History Department, Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performance Art, Kingston, Jamaica
Petrina specialises in public sculpture, memory and memorial practices and the Caribbean and Black Diaspora Art. Her research has focused on Jamaican national history and public sculpture, the relationship between contemporary art, death and memory and, recently, on the trope of Queen Victoria in the African diaspora. Her publications include: ‘Monuments and Meaning’ (2004), ‘“But Bogle was a Bold Man”: Vision, History and Power for a New Jamaica’ (2009) and ‘The Statue in the Park: Commemorating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in Jamaica’ (2016). Petrina has served as a curator at the National Museum, Jamaica and the National Gallery of Jamaica.
Melissa Hamnett
Head of Heritage Collections and Chief Curator, Parliament
Melissa is responsible for the management and strategic development of the Parliamentary Art Collection, Architectural Fabric Collection, and Historic Furniture and Decorative Arts Collection. She is currently working on the collections care, access and engagement opportunities afforded by the Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster (the largest capital project on a heritage building in the UK). Prior to coming to Parliament, Melissa worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where from 2007 she was Curator of Sculpture 1850 to the Present. She has spoken and published on 19th- and 20th-century sculpture, specialising on the links between British and French output, the New Sculpture and British sculpture after Rodin. She has worked on multiple contemporary commissions, advised on public sculpture projects in the UK and abroad, and is a Trustee of the Decorative Arts Society.
Dr Eleanor Hughes
Deputy Director for Art & Program, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
A scholar of 18th-century British art, Ellie has organized many major exhibitions, often in partnership with national public museums in the UK, and has worked extensively with living artists in Britain and the United States. Most recently she led the reinstallation and reinterpretation of Hackerman House at 1 West Mount Vernon Place, the historic house that forms part of the Walters; her work on the house as a microcosm of Baltimore brought to light its connections with the history of slavery in the United States. In her current role at the Walters and in her previous post as Associate Director of Exhibitions and Publications, and Associate Curator at the Yale Center for British Art, she has edited and published widely, including Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting (2016) and The Walters Art Museum: Excursions Through the Collection (2020), and has authored essays on marine painting, empire, and Thomas Banks’ monument to Captain George Blagdon Westcott at St. Paul’s.
Dr Susan Jenkins FSA
Curator, Westminster Abbey
Susan is responsible for the object collections at Westminster Abbey and is working on a catalogue of its monumental sculpture. She project-curated the Abbey’s new Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries and has held curatorial roles as Senior Curator at English Heritage, the Getty Museum, Historic Royal Palaces and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Susan studied at Cambridge, the Courtauld Institute and Yale. Her recent publications include articles for The Burlington Magazine: ‘John Flaxman’s funerary monument for the 1st Earl of Mansfield in Westminster Abbey’ (2020) and ‘Royal wooden funeral effigies at Westminster Abbey’ (2019); as well as The Queen’s Window by David Hockney: Westminster Abbey (2020); ‘The Cottington and Bradshaw burials in Westminster Abbey’ in Fonthill Recovered, edited by Caroline Dakers (2018); and ‘Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, Apsley House and Canova’s Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker’ (Sculpture Journal, 2010).
Dr Sophie Matthiesson
Senior Curator, International Art at Auckland Museum Toi o Tāmaki
Sophie is responsible for Auckland Museum’s historical and modern international art collection, including the Mackelvie Collection. She was previously Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and has also held academic posts at the University of Leeds and the University of Manchester. Recent curatorial projects include Degas: A New Vision (2016) and Van Gogh: The Seasons (2017).
Donna McDowell
Head of Schools & Family Learning, St Paul’s Cathedral
A Religious Studies & Philosophy teacher by training, Donna’s undergraduate studies focused on African and Asian history with particular consideration given to colonialism and its aftermath. She has a Masters in Theology & Theatre and is currently the Head of Schools & Family Learning at St Paul’s Cathedral, where she is responsible for the learning programmes for visiting schools and family groups, as well as outreach to young people, particularly young creatives. Previous projects have included poetry residencies, live street art, community art installations, and a refugee story-telling event. Current projects include a collaboration with Poet in the City Young Producers and Westminster Abbey to stage a series of events creatively exploring what it means to be British today.
Dr Martin Myrone
Lead curator, Pre-1800 British Art, Tate
Martin’s research has centred on British art of the long eighteenth century (c.1650–1850). He has a special interest in the work of Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and history painting c.1750–1830, with a particular focus on questions of gender and identity and on the emerging exhibition cultures and art worlds of the period. He has curated major exhibitions at Tate Britain, including John Martin: Apocalypse (2011) and William Blake (2019-20), and he has published widely on these artists and their contemporaries.
Professor Charmaine A. Nelson
Faculty of Art History & Communication Studies, McGill University, Canada
Charmaine’s research and teaching interests include postcolonial and black feminist scholarship, Transatlantic Slavery Studies, and Black Diaspora Studies: exploring various types of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and popular art forms, including sculpture. Her scholarship examines Canadian, American, European, and Caribbean art and visual culture. She has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, Black Canadian Studies, and African Canadian Art History. Her most recent book is Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016). She is also the author of The Colour of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007). Charmaine edits the Black Canadian Studies website.
Dr Clare O’Dowd
Research Curator, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
Clare received her PhD in from the University of Manchester in 2013, where she was Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Art History prior to joining the Henry Moore Institute in 2019. Clare’s teaching and research interests focus on the histories of sculpture, particularly sculpture’s relationship to architecture and its sociopolitical functions. As well as teaching, Clare has been involved in researching and curating a number of exhibitions, most recently No Particular Place to Go at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester.
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Professor Morna O’Neill
Department of Art, Wake Forest University, North Carolina, US
Morna’s current research focuses on the conjunction of art, design, and politics at the end of the nineteenth century. She curated the Whitworth Art Gallery exhibition Art and Labour’s Cause is One: Walter Crane and Manchester, 1880-1915 (2008 – 2009) and is the author of both the exhibition catalogue (2008) and the monograph of the artist, Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875-1890 (2011). Recent research projects include the display of decorative arts at international exhibitions (1889-1911) and Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893-1915 (Yale University Press, 2018).
Dr Janina Ramirez
Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford
Janina is a Research Fellow in History of Art at the University of Oxford. She gained her PhD in ‘The Symbolic Life of Birds in Anglo-Saxon England’ at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, where she remains an Honorary Fellow. Janina has written a number of books, both fiction and non-fiction, including The Private Lives of Saints (2015), Julian of Norwich (2017) and The Viking Mystery series for OUP which won the Young Quills award in 2019. She has written and presented over thirty documentaries for BBC Four, including ‘The Hundred Years War’ and the ‘Art Lovers’ Guide’ Series. She has a popular podcast – ‘The Art Detective’ – and is a regular contributor to television and radio, including ‘Front Row’ for Radio 4.
View institutional profile (University of Nottingham)
View institutional profile (Henry Moore Foundation)
Dr Rebecca Senior
Henry Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Nottingham
Rebecca is a Henry Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Nottingham. Her postdoctoral project, titled ‘Allegories of Violence: Visual histories of the British Empire in Monumental Sculpture’, explores how visual allegory enabled monuments to ‘work’ as extensions of British imperial project during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has published on monuments and allegory in ,e Sculpture Journal and Church Monuments Society Journal, alongside contemporary art writing journals, and has worked on several Arts Council England-funded publications with contemporary artists. Currently, she is producing a collaborative publication with artists in Leeds on shifting artistic approaches to monumentality and regional identity. Rebecca received her PhD in History of Art from the University of York in 2018.
Dr Alison Smith
Chief Curator, National Portrait Gallery
Alison oversees the Curatorial Department and the Archive & Library at the National Portrait Gallery, where she is currently working on the gallery’s major transformation project, ‘Inspiring People’. Alison’s past research projects include the scientific and religious dimensions of Victorian art and the relationship between medium and meaning in Pre-Raphaelite painting. She has published widely on the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as curating major exhibitions at Tate Britain, where she was Lead Curator, British Art to 1900, including, most recently Edward Burne-Jones (2018-19).
