Dr Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth

Job title:

Lecturer in History of Art

Role:

Programme Director, MSc Global Premodern Art

cmccaffr@ed.ac.uk

Office:

Room 0.64, Higgot Gallery

Research Output:

Edinburgh Research Explorer link

Biography

Dr Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth is an art historian and curator specialising in the visual and material cultures of early modern Europe. She is Lecturer in French and British History of Art c.1650-1900, specialising in material culture and design. Caroline was previously Curator of 1600-1800 Ceramics & Glass at the V&A Museum and Lecturer in History of Design for the Royal College of Art/V&A. She is currently writing two books, one on the art collector and philanthropist Lady Charlotte Schreiber for Lund Humphries (2024), and a forthcoming monograph entitled Sèvres-mania: The Craft of Ceramics Connoisseurship for Bloomsbury Academic (2025). Caroline gained her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2019 and is currently a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, where she co-supervises a PhD CDP student with Prof.Abigail Harrison Moore.

Caroline is a Trustee for the French Porcelain Society, the English Ceramics Circle and the Furniture History Society. She is also a Freeman of the City of London for the Worshipful Company of Art Scholars. She has written for a number of museums, exhibitions, private collections and art publications including, Apollo, Ceramic Review, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Wallace Collection, The Hugh Langmead Collection, The Chitra Collection and The Antiques Trade Gazette. She is available for consultancy work and regularly acts as an advisor for ceramics collections, including: Art UK Ceramics Strategy, Doddington Hall, Winterthur Museum and Bristol Art Museum.

Teaching

Caroline uses an object-led and research-informed approach to her teaching and given her curatorial background is committed to ‘practice informed learning’ whereby ‘expertise from industry is brought into the classroom to inform teaching practice’ (Guild HE, 2018). She was recently nominated for the 'Best Teacher Award' by the Students' Association at the University of Edinburgh.

Caroline's current specialist courses include:

Approaching World Objects (Course Leader). Core Course for the Global Premodern Art: History Heritage and Curation MSc
Versailles to Napoleon III, the Cost of Luxury, 1682-1873 (Course Leader). MSc special option course
From Versailles to La Guillotine: Visualising the Cost of Luxury, 1682-1804 (Course Leader). 4th year (Hons).
The Power in Small Things, 1700-1900 (Course Leader). 3rd year (Hons)

Caroline also teaches on other team-taught courses, including: Global Rome (MSc, Global Premodern Art: History Heritage and Curation); History of Art 1B; Analyzing Art History and supervises undergraduate and postgraduate dissertation projects.

Research

Caroline is an award-winning art historian and curator whose work has previously been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, National Heritage Lottery Fund, The Headley Trust, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Association for Art History, White Rose College of the Arts, Winterthur Museum, Henry Moore Foundation, Paul Mellon Centre, and Newham Borough of London.

Her work has been published in various academic journals and books including Bloomsbury Academic, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Taylor & Francis. Her current research projects include work on ceramics as political and historical agents; the cultural aesthetics of eighteenth-century porcelain sculpture; the history of collecting and the market for decorative arts in 19th-century Europe and America. She is Co-Investigator of the pioneering science heritage AHRC-funded CapCo Project Making London Porcelain with the V&A Museum, the Ashmolean Museum and Newham Borough of London (awarded March 2022).

Caroline is an art historian specialising in the visual and material culture of Britain and France (c.1650-1900), with a focus on material and visual literacy, the epistemology of connoisseurship, and the disciplinary formation of art history. Her research explores how networks of artists, designers, consumers, collectors, dealers, and cultural institutions interact with each other through embodied object and knowledge exchange, producing new forms of historical discourse.