Dr Jess Bailey is Lecturer in Premodern Art, specialising in Medieval Europe. Her research addresses art histories of consent and its violation, exploring the representation of the human form alongside organised and interpersonal violence. Bailey’s work foregrounds questions of gender, sexuality, and disability. She is particularly interested in manuscripts, early works on paper, and textiles.

Bailey writes about cultures of militarism and its discontents particularly in the 1300s through early 1500s when artists, soldiers, and doctors grappled with the rise of gunpowder. Her work considers how values of imperialism as articulated in visual culture impacted intimate encounters with the human body. Bailey’s current research project, Conquest & Consent, centres on Medieval figurative quilts and cultural negotiations of sexuality. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, this work was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the History of Art Department at University College London.

Alongside interests in precarity, representation, and violence, Bailey is editing a volume on Medieval protest with Professor Bob Mills, UCL and collaborating with the Universität Zurich based team Rethinking Art History Through Disability. Bailey’s research has been funded by Wellcome Collection, The Paul Mellon Centre, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Bern, and UC Berkeley. She taught in the History of Art Department at UCL where she was an Associate Lecturer in Medieval Art History, winning a Student Choice Teaching Award in 2023. Bailey earned her PhD in the History of Art and Medieval Studies from the University of California at Berkeley.

Alongside her work with premodern art, Bailey maintains a strong research and practice-based interest in art histories of quilting. Passionate about the wider accessibility of art history, Bailey wrote Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Histories of Radical Quilting (2nd edition, 2024) for grassroots publishing initiative Common Threads Press. She collaborates with curator Dr Sharbreon Plummer (Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South, MMA, 2024), founding The People’s Quilting Bee (2023-24), a public humanities course centring social justice histories of the medium. Bailey programs Gender & Cloth for The Paul Mellon Centre with art historian Dr Gabe Beckhurst (parts I & II, 2024-25). Bailey is also organising a research and practice-based project with cultural historian and hand quilter Deb McGuire. Within the Frame aims to preserve the endangered art form of hand quilting in a frame in the British Isles while amplifying its diverse histories. Bailey shares these public arts education projects alongside her own quilt fundraisers through @publiclibraryquilts carrying forward a family tradition. Her community quilts have raised substantial sums for Black land reparations (Land in Our Names), safe housing for queer and trans youth (True Colours United), and grassroots library initiatives (The Kin Folk Archive, Ashley J. May, Brown University.) Bailey is currently writing a book on art histories of quilting under contract with Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Penguin Random House.