Staff profile

My research is about the relationship between visual culture and animal history. The work I do tends to be interdisciplinary, and is generally motivated by questions about the use of animal materials in art, as well as the depiction of human-animal interactions from modernity to now. More broadly, I am interested in how fundamental the ‘species divide’ between humans and nonhumans was to European modernity and its visual manifestations. Furthermore, I am concerned with how the categories of ‘human’ and ‘nature’ are applied within Western traditions of knowledge production.

My current book project is titled Animals, Meat and Media in Victorian Art and Visual Culture, in which I will argue that modern meat production changed the way that images were made and circulated in late nineteenth-century Britain. The project encompasses artworks by the likes of Edwin Landseer and Thomas Sidney Cooper alongside materials such as pastoral photography and abattoir blueprints, which I situate within the wider social and political field of the nineteenth-century British Empire.

• Art history and visual culture
• Photography
• Print culture
• Animal history
• Materiality and media
• Animal-derived materials
• History and theory of meat eating
• Modern British history