Job title: Lecturer, 17th/18th Century British/European Art History

Role: History of Art 1 Programme Coordinator

Tel: 0131 6515 940

Email: c.a.murray@ed.ac.uk

Office address: 0.50 Hunter Building

Research outputs: Dr Catriona Murray on Edinburgh Research Explorer

 

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.

 

Catriona’s teaching is strongly influenced by her research and introduces students to key issues in the relationships between art, politics and society in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.
Her third-year special options course, Picturing Authority: Art and Politics at the Tudor and Stuart Courts, explores the visual representation of power through close study of royal portraiture, decorative schemes, public statuary, printed ephemera and court spectacle.
Her fourth-year special options course, Cradle to Grave: Art and Society in Britain from Holbein to Hogarth, examines the representation of gender, the life cycle, religion, status and nationality across a range of media, assessing how early modern men and women defined their social relationships and fashioned their identities.
She also lectures on Northern Renaissance and Baroque art for History of Art 1 and contributes to the Renaissance and Early Modern Studies and History of Art: Theory and Display MSc courses.

 

​Research Interests: 

Visual and material culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain

Art and propaganda

Scoto- and Anglo-European relations

Artistic patronage, collaboration and process

Ceremony, ritual and performance

Death, commemoration and memory

PhD Supervision Topics

Accepting applications.

  • Visual and Material Culture in Early Modern Britain
  • The Tudor and Stuart Courts
  • Art and Propaganda
  • Ritual and Performance