Viccy Coltman is a Professor of eighteenth-century History of Art, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London and Scotland. A former head of the School of History of Art during the merger between the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art (2010-13), she has extensive leading and management experience, in addition to an international reputation for her original, archival-based research. She specialises in visual and material culture in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth-century in Scotland in its imperial and colonial contexts. She has published three books and two edited volumes, all with university presses, of which the most recent Art and Identity in Scotland: A cultural history from the Jacobite rising of 1745 to Walter Scott, (Cambridge University Press, 2019, paperback, 2021) was shortlisted for a Historians of British Art book prize.

In 2006 Viccy was awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize. Since then, her work has been generously supported by grants and fellowships from the British School at Rome, the Yale Center for British Art, Colonial Williamsburg, the Huntington Library, the Whitney Humanities Centre at Yale, the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, the North Caroliniana Society, the British Academy, CRASSH (University of Cambridge), CASVA (National gallery of Art, Washington DC) and IASH (University of Edinburgh). From 2020-21 she was the recipient of a Paul Mellon Centre senior fellowship working on her new book Wartime, about the visual and material culture of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in Britain, 1793-1815. This project has also been supported by a fellowship at Brown University, working on the Anne S. K. Brown military collection. In 2022, she joins the advisory council of the Paul Mellon Centre.

Viccy is highly sought after as a PhD supervisor and to date, has supervised 11 PhD students with 8 in progress. In 2020 she won Supervisor of the Year in the EUSA teaching awards. Her current students are funded by the SGSAH, the Carnegie Trust (winner of the Robertson medal, 2021), Edinburgh University scholarships and BSECS (British Society for eighteenth-century studies). Her former students have been appointed to lectureships and curatorships in the UK. Viccy is an experienced mentor for members of the department and for early career scholars at IASH.

Collaboration is a feature of Viccy’s work and she was an external advisor for the UCL Leverhulme-funded project ‘The East India Company at Home’ (PI: Margot Finn) and a contributor to the AHRC-funded Early Modern Dress and Textiles Research Network (PI: Evelyn Welch). She is currently involved in a project with Professor Leith Davis (Simon Fraser University) looking at the ‘Lyon in Mourning’, a Jacobite manuscript in the National Library of Scotland.

Viccy has co-convened a number of international conferences and symposia, on Portraiture and Materiality with Marcia Pointon at the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute in 2012; Politeness and Prurience: Shaping transgressive sexualities in the long eighteenth century, University of Edinburgh, 2012; Sir Henry Raeburn: Critical Reception and International Reputation, National Gallery of Scotland, 2006. She was the academic lead on a MOOC devoted to Jacobite material culture – a collaboration with the National Museum Scotland – which ran three times and attracted over 10,000 learners.