Sebastian Tym

Sebastian Tym is a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter (Viva Voce scheduled January 2025). The recipient of numerous funding grants, such as the Niklaus-Cartwright Scholarship Award and the Company of Arts Charitable Scholars Award, Sebastian is a specialist of the art, history, and philosophical edifice of Napoleonic France, with a research focus on the complex and politically charged interplay between past, present, and future under both Napoleonic empires (1803 - 1814-15; 1852 - 1870). He is also more broadly interested in the development of European political science as well as European geopolitical, imperial, and military history from 1517 - 1918. His doctoral thesis concerns an illustrated polemic from the period of the Crimean War by the artist Gustave Doré, titled Histoire Dramatique, pittoresque et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie (1854).

In 2019, Sebastian was awarded a First-Class Masters by Research (ResM) degree in Art History at the University of Plymouth, where he finished top of his class. Since then, he has maintained a special interest in the life and work of Gustave Doré, whom he continues to write about today. In 2021, Sebastian presented seminal research exploring a series of allegorical canvasses by Doré which put in dialogue the Theban Cycle of Aeschylus and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 at the major international conference marking the 150^th anniversary of the Paris Commune, The Commune and Its Others: An Outsider’s History of 1871, at Durham University and the Bowes Museum. A publication concerning this research is forthcoming.