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 sixteenth, 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. Imaging Stuart Family Politics was awarded the 2017 Royal Studies Journal Book Prize. In January 2020, Catriona took up a Paul Mellon Mid-Career Fellowship to develop a new research programme. This project considers the Stuarts’ involved relationship with the monumental image, analysing how sculpture served to mediate royal authority, public loyalty and political opposition. In January 2023, she was awarded a Royal Society of Edinburgh Personal Fellowship to support the completion of her second monograph, Figuring Stuart Monarchy: Monumental Sculpture and the Royal Image, 1603-1819. Catriona has published widely on topics from seventeenth-century funeral effigies to nineteenth-century historiography.

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. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from 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; the Royal Society of Edinburgh; the Henry Moore Foundation; the Huntington Library and Art Museum; Funds for Women Graduates and the AHRC. Catriona has developed close working relationships and collaborations with a number of UK museums and galleries and is currently academic advisor to the National Galleries of Scotland's research project on King James VI and I. She is also co-investigator on John Michael Wright and the Art of Invention. Supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, this collaborative research project, also with the National Galleries of Scotland, adopts a new perspective on this remarkable artist, analysing the complex political, religious and cultural networks in which he operated under the later Stuarts. Catriona is a founding member of the Material Culture in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Research Cluster, which hosts seminars, conferences and special events throughout the year.