Dr Brigid von Preussen

Brigid is an art historian working on art and design in Britain in the long eighteenth century. Her previous and ongoing research uses ‘Neoclassical’ art as a focus for examining authorship, reproduction, and artistic identity in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain, with case studies of the work of Robert Adam, Angelica Kauffman, Josiah Wedgwood, and John Flaxman. Her current research project investigates the relationship between British Neoclassicism and ideas about beauty, national identity, empire, and race. In 2022, she organised the online seminar series and workshop Neoclassicism, Race and Empire with Dr Charles Kang, supported by Christ Church and by TORCH.

For more details and recordings of the seminars, please see https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/neoclassicism-race-and-empire.

For a recent video that introduces some of the broader themes of Brigid’s work, see https://vimeo.com/874123947/2ace02e6d5?share=copy. 

Brigid holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge, an MA from the Warburg Institute, and a PhD from Columbia University. She has held fellowships at Christ Church (University of Oxford), the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Yale Centre for British Art, and the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Publications

‘At the Queen’s Gallery’, London Review of Books, vol. 45, no. 13 (29 June 2023).

‘Canova comes in from the cold’, Apollo, vol. 196, no. 718 (March 2023).

‘Don’t tread on me’ (Review of Tristram Hunt, 'The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain'), London Review of Books, vol. 44, no. 24 (15 December 2022), pp. 17–8. 

‘Furnishing School’, Apollo, vol. 187, no. 665 (2018), pp. 74–9.

‘1779’ and ‘1801’, in Mark Hallett, Sarah Victoria Turner, and Jessica Feather, eds., The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769-2018 (published online by The Paul Mellon Centre, 2018).

‘“A wild kind of imagination”: eclecticism and excess in the English rococo designs of Thomas Johnson’, in Melissa Hyde and Katie Scott, eds., Rococo Echo: Art, History and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014), pp. 191–211.