Academic staff profile Dr Catriona Murray

Catriona Murray is a historian of early modern British visual and material culture. Her research focuses on the intersections of art and propaganda during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
In particular, she is interested in the exchanges between ruler and subject, exploring how images of authority were promoted and received. 

Her first monograph, Imaging Stuart Family Politics: Dynastic Crisis and Continuity (2016), explores the promotion of familial propaganda under the Stuarts. Bringing together royal ritual, court portraiture and popular prints, it argues that dynastic and domestic representations were strategically developed to endorse political agendas. Catriona is also developing a new research programme, which considers the Stuarts’ involved relationship with the monumental image, analysing how sculpture served to mediate royal authority, public loyalty and political opposition.

Catriona joined the department as Lecturer in 2015. Originally from Aberdeen, she moved to Edinburgh to study for the MA in Fine Art, before pursuing a Masters and PhD in History of Art. She has published several articles on visual culture at the Stuart court and has held fellowships at the Institute of Historical Research (University of London); the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh); the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University in London); and at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Catriona is on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of the Northern Renaissance.