Emma Pearce is a second-year History of Art PhD Candidate funded by the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Enlightenment Identities Scholarship. Her project examines the Atlantic circulations of tartan in the British empire during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and how the textile was used to construct various colonial identities. Emma’s wider research interests lie in the global interconnections of textiles and people, fusions of culture, and the development of identities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Emma received her MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2021, graduating with a Distinction, specialising in Circum-Atlantic Visual Culture 1770-1830 under the supervision of Dr Esther Chadwick. Her dissertation explored the Caribbean origins, production and circulation of the robe à la creole, a muslin shift dress popularised by Marie Antoinette in the 1780s. She completed her BA in History of Art from the University of York in 2020, receiving a First-Class Honours (with Distinction).
