Emma Piercy-Wright

Provisional thesis title: Inside Out: Mother-of-Pearl in France during the Age of Enlightenment 1685 - 1815

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 in France during the Age of Enlightenment 1685 - 1815' examines a series of scintillating case studies to foreground forgotten elements of this seminal era in French, colonial and world history. She is broadly interested in shells, iridescence and women in 18th century France.