Dr Olivia Ferguson
August 2018 to 31 May 2019
John Kay: A New View of Caricature
My current research interests revolve around caricature as a trans-medial phenomenon in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and at IASH I am working on a critical reappraisal of the Edinburgh-based portraitist John Kay (1742-1826). As part of my project I will organise a series of experimental life drawing workshops teaching the history of caricature.
My doctoral research investigated literary forms of caricature in the early-nineteenth-century novel as shaped by historical practices of textual, graphic, and dramatic caricature. I looked at the stylistic, thematic, and socio-political significance of caricature in the works of Thomas Love Peacock, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, James Hogg, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and the Blackwood's circle.
I have published work in Gothic Studies, Persuasions On-Line, and Notes and Queries. My article 'Historicizing Austen's "Caricatures"' is open-access and available to read here: http://jasna.org/publications/persuasions-online/volume-38-no-2/ferguson/.