A New Visual Narrative of Nineteenth-Century Historicism

I will be working with professor Caroline van Eck and the Victoria and Albert Museum on the V&A MUSEUM AHRC
COLLABORATIVE DOCTORAL PARTNERSHIP. The PhD student will examine seven styles that were considered in the
nineteenth century as the major material constituents of human culture, and which are all represented in the V&A's
collections: Egyptian, Assyrian, Classical, Medieval European, Islamic, Chinese and Indian. I will identify nineteenthcentury
objects that revived each style and will reconstruct how the trajectory of these objects, or the types to which they
belong, functioned in the material constitution of political, national, ethnic, religious or cultural identities in the nineteenth
century. Personally, I am interested in researching how this interacts with issues of history writing at a time of growing
professionalisation of art history, issues of taste and collecting, and how this intersects with issues of gender, ethnicity,
and class, as well as the paradoxes of authenticity working in the possible differences between the historic versus the
historicist object.