Dr Freya Gowrley

Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr Freya Gowrley is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. She is currently finishing a monograph on domestic space, identity, and emotion in the period 1750-1840, and is beginning work on a new research project on collage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 2017, she was a Visiting Scholar at both Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library and Yale Center for British Art, and held a Short-Term Research Fellowship at the Winterthur Museum and Library. In 2018, she will hold Short-Term Research Fellowships at the Huntington Library and Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.

Project Description

This project will provide an unprecedented history of collage made between 1700 and 1900. Through detailed analysis of its various forms, it will explore the complex relationship between identity, emotion, and the production of collage, asking how its creation reflected the interests, intimacies, and identities of its makers. At the same time, the project will situate this history of collage in relation to the writing of art history more broadly; considering collage against key disciplinary concerns such as materiality, canonicity, categorisation, craft, medium specificity, and periodization.