Dr HELEN PIERCE

Dr HELEN PIERCE The University of Aberdeen School of Divinity, History & Philosophy Lecturer work +44 (0)1224 272621 pref h.pierce@abdn.ac.uk pref History of Art, School of Divinity, History & Philosophy, 50-52 College Bounds, ABERDEEN, AB24 3DS

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Biography

PhD, History of Art, University of York, 2004

MA, History of Art, University of York, 2000

BA (Hons), English and History of Art, University of York, 1999

I arrived at the University of Aberdeen in September 2010 as a Teaching Fellow in History of Art, having spent three years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of York's Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, and two years as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University. I was appointed as Lecturer in British Art in June 2012. I've also held research fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. 

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Research Interests

I carry out research into British art of the early modern period (c.1550-1750), with a particular focus on the interplay between printed images, propaganda and polemic across the seventeenth century. My monograph Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England redresses an established art historical bias privileging genres such as elite portraiture over printed media, and challenges the presence of a pervasive 'iconophobia' in post-Reformation English culture. I'm now working on two projects; firstly, a book-length study examining the activities of artists and patrons in Britain during the 1650s, a period traditionally understood as artistically limited and culturally compromised by a strong Puritan presence within the country’s political sphere. I'm also interested in the artistic activities and networking of the late seventeenth-century York Virtuosi.

 

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Teaching Responsibilities

HA1004 Introduction to Art History: Case Studies In Western Art

HA1505 In the Flesh: Art on Location (course convenor)

HA1506 Modern and Contemporary Art

HA2002 Classical to Columbus: European Art 200-1600

HA2005 Making Masterpieces: Ten Works in Context

HA2502 Renaissance and Baroque: From Michelangelo to Rembrandt

HA3073 Art and Politics in Early Modern Britain (course convenor)

HA3082 Painting in Tudor and Early Stuart England (course convenor)

HA4057 Critical Perspectives in Art History 

HA5529 Art in Early Modern Scotland (course convenor)

 

**Winner of the 'Fantastic Feedback' category and nominated for 'Innovative Teaching' in the 2010/11 University of Aberdeen Student-Led Teaching Awards**

I also welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students looking to carry out doctoral research in the visual arts of early modern Britain.

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Recent research papers

'"This Ingenious young Gent and excellent artist": William Lodge (1649-1689) and the York Virtuosi', Histories of British Art, 1660-1735: Reconstruction and Transformation, conference at the University of York, September 2012. 

 

'"There is an abuse of drawing in this": Stephen College and the limits of pictorial libel', Libel in Historical, Literary and Transnational Contexts, c.1580-1780, conference at the British Studies Center, Rutgers University, New Jersey, April 2012; invited speaker.

'Francis Barlow: the political animal', British Art 1660-1735: Close Readings, conference at Tate Britain, London, May 2011; invited speaker.

'Playing for laughs? Cards, cartoons and controversy during the Exclusion Crisis', The Printed Image Within a Culture of Print, conference at the Courtauld Institute, London, April 2011.

'The art of memory: illustrating John Nalson’s Impartial Collection', Readings and Representations of the Seventeenth Century, conference at Chetham’s Library, Manchester, January 2011; invited speaker.

'Political playing cards and the iconography of gambling during the English Restoration', Early Modern Studies conference at the University of Reading, July 2010. 

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Publications

Monographs                                                                      

Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008).

**Nominated for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History**

Book chapters

'Graphic satire and the printed image in Shakespeare's London' in Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013).

'Images, representation, and counter-representation' in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Vol.1: Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

'Artful ambivalence? Picturing Charles I during the Interregnum' in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism During the Interregnum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

 'The devil's bloodhound: Roger L'Estrange caricatured', in Michael Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation (Ashgate Press, 2010).

 'A Dutch devil in Derbyshire: adaptation and appropriation in a 1624 broadside' in Tara Hamling and Richard Williams (eds.), Art Re-Formed? Re-Assessing the Impact of the Reformation on the Visual Arts (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).

Journal articles

‘All ‘sorts of pictures of stories’: the print in early modern England’, review article, Huntington Library Quarterly, 74:4 (December 2011), 629-33.

'Unseemly pictures: political graphic satire in 1620s England', The British Art Journal, 6:1 (2005), 56-61.

'Anti-Episcopacy and graphic satire in England, 1640-1645', The Historical Journal, 47:4 (2004), 809-848.

Other

Entries for 'John Collet' (painter) and 'Theodore de Bry' (engraver) in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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