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 The Creaturely Camera: Early British Photography's Animal Substances and Sitters, which explores how photographers’ experiments with nonhuman subjects and substances was fundamental to the medium’s burgeoning popularity, and in turn helped to redefine the modern categorisation of ‘animal’ for British audiences during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. A new and distinctly modern animalian taxonomy comprising ‘pets’, ‘edible’, ‘wildlife’, and ‘endangered’ species came into focus in front of the Victorian and Edwardian camera lens. The book will also include a discursive compendium of all the raw animal materials used to produce, circulate and socialise the medium. Historical photography archives therefore reveal how our contemporary anthropocentric relationship with other species found popular expression for the first time in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a recognition which poses urgent questions, in the current context of mass extinction, about how and why these animals came to represent humans’ modern relationship with nature. 

• 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