Emma Piercy-Wright

Provisional thesis title: Inside Out: Nacre, Empire, Gender and The Hidden European Enlightenment

Co-supervisors: Professor Melissa Percival (Exeter), Dr Freya Gowrley (Bristol)

Funded by the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (AHRC)

Emma Piercy-Wright is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate and passionate feminist art historian specialising in the art and material culture of the long eighteenth century. She holds a Master's in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where her dissertation on women, mother-of-pearl and memory in the circum-Atlantic world was awarded a high distinction. Her forthcoming interdisciplinary thesis likewise foregrounds this 'vibrant material' as an apt and exceptionally vivid ‘Enlightenment transcript’ – a tangible alternative means of visualising and repositioning marginalised imperial and female histories in Britain and France between 1685 and 1790. She is broadly interested in shells, iridescence and women in 18th century Europe.

Emma is also the founder and chair of the University of Exeter Material Culture Research Cluster, and her work has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre, the Decorative Arts Trust and the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (BSECS).