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 leadership 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  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 and a second Yale Centre for British Art Fellowship. Material from what will be her fourth book was showcased in the Summer of 2026 as a series of six annual lectures established in 1876 as the Rhind Lectures for the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. In 2022, Viccy joined  the advisory council of the Paul Mellon Centre. She is a trustee of the Runciman Apse Trust and the Jacobite Trust. 

Viccy is highly sought after as a PhD supervisor and to date, has supervised 17 PhD students with 5 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 in the UK at inter alia Bristol University, Glasgow School of Art (GSA) and de Montfort University. They work as curators at National Museums Scotland and elsewhere. Viccy is an experienced mentor for members of the department and for early career scholars at IASH. She is currently mentoring Dr. Hardeep Dhindsa, a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellow working on eighteenth-century British History painting. 

Collaboration has long been 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 was   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. She is presently working with the Buccleuch Heritage Trust on a digital reconstruction of the gallery at Dalkeith Palace. 

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.