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 thesis, entitled Inside Out: Mother-of-Pearl, Empire and The Peripheral European Enlightenment' examines a series of scintillating case studies to foreground forgotten elements of this seminal era in European, colonial and world history. 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.