Fern Insh
Fern Insh is a PhD candidate working with Dr. John Morrison and Prof. Peter Davidson in the department of History of Art. When complete, her PhD will make a substantial contribution to the documentation of a seventeenth-century Scottish visual culture.
Specialist knowledge of early modern European print culture, gained from completing a postgraduate degree at the Courtauld Institute of art in London, has equipped her with some of the tools which will help her to make sense of applied as well as fine art in this epoch in Scottish history. Some discoveries of links between Northern continental print sources and Scottish visual identity have already been made in the first year of her doctoral studies and she believes she has gained some insight into a vocabulary of imagery based on the replication and the consideration of said sources. This gives Fern confidence in attempting to extend her survey to as many works of early modern Scottish Art as possible. In addition to analysing portraits of the aristocracy by Scotland's first native portrait painter, George Jamesone, she is currently locating and researching portraits by burgh artists and decorative works produced by craftsmen. Fern is interested, however, in all images made in Scotland in any form from ca.1450-1700, but most especially in anything produced in the early seventeenth century.
Although Fern is sponsored by the AHRC, she believes her topic lends itself to the ethos of the North Sea World research project and, therefore, is an affiliate of the scheme.
Fern is a teaching assistant for 'HA1004: Introduction to Art History' and 'HA1504: Art in the Flesh'.
She also writes for the Scottish Art Blog: http://www.scottishartblog.com
Recent Publications:
Insh, F. (2012). ‘Recusants and the Rosary: A Seventeenth-Century Chapel in Aberdeen’, Recusant History, vol 31, no. 2.
Conference Papers:
Why That There? The Importance of Order in Early-Modern Scottish Visual Culture
Research paper given at the Centre For Early Modern Studies (CEMS) Postgraduate Symposium.
March 2012. University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
An Introduction to Scottish Visual Culture in the Early-Modern Era
Research paper given as part of the North Sea World (NSW) seminar series.
April 2012. University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
A Modern Cycle: Exploring Globalist-Nationalist Identity in the Visual Culture of the Seventeenth and of the Twenty-first Centuries in Scotland.
Research paper to be given at On the Edge: Transitions, Transgressions, and Transformations in Irish and Scottish Studies.
June 2013. University of Simon Fraser, Vancouver, Canada.
