Drawing as Knowledge: Practice, Theory and History

Isobel Elstob is Assistant Professor in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Nottingham. Her research explores how contemporary artists engage with marginalised, obscure or traumatic historical narratives. Her monograph Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond (2023), from which she also curated an exhibition (2023–24), examines how artists revive Victorian visual technologies, such as magic lanterns, deploy taxidermy as a contemporary medium, and re-present overlooked histories and colonial narratives centred on Nigerian and Caribbean histories. More recently, Isobel’s work has been focused on the visual cultures of British natural history in the late-eighteenth century and the central role played by illustration, taxidermy and display in knowledge-making in this period. Isobel sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Fiction and the advisory board for Languages Texts and Society. She has contributed to panel discussions and given keynote lectures and conference presentations nationally and internationally and directed art engagement events for galleries and museums. Her publications include contributions to the essay collection, Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World (2019), and articles in Visual Studies, the Journal of Victorian Culture and the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies.

John Bonehill is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Glasgow, where his research and teaching addresses various aspects of British art and culture of the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on landscape and topography. He is currently completing a book entitled “The Face of the Country: Estate Portraiture in Britain, 1645–1760”.   

Jane Alden is a musicologist, singer and conductor with expertise in notation and visual culture in medieval and modern experimental music; she finds links between these two eras that play into her work on manuscript studies and the social contexts of musical performance. Professor of Music and Chair of Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University, CT, Jane’s publications include the monograph Songs, Scribes, and Society: The History and Reception of the Loire Valley Chansonniers (OUP, 2010) and the collaborative CD-book Ma dame, tresgente et belle (Bayard, 2024). She is continuing to develop her medieval work with projects on mise-en-page relating to musical notation and the intertextuality of medieval poetry and song collections. Jane is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute, London and is working on a book project, “Visual Echoes: The Experimental Notation of Musical Objects Across Time”. She has degrees from Manchester University, King’s College London, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Trinity College Dublin. Jane sees performance as the most effective way to reach out beyond academia to communicate with the wider public. She is the Founder and Director of the Vocal Constructivists, a London-based experimental group that specialises in performing experimental scores (www.vocalconstructivists.com @vocalconstructivists). The group has premiered over thirty new commissions and offers radical new interpretations of established works. Their full-length album, Walking Still, is available on the Innova label (#898). Jane maintains an active research, teaching and performance career in the US and the UK.   

Michaela Giebelhausen is Assistant Professor in Art History and Curatorial Practices at the University of Birmingham. She holds a DPhil/PhD in Art History from the University of Oxford and an MA in Art History, Modern History and English Literature from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt.  

She has previously taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art; was course leader of BA Culture, Criticism and Curating at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London; and Director of the Centre of Curatorial Studies at the University of Essex.   

Her research interests sit in several areas: museum architecture and histories; exhibition histories; Victorian art; eighteenth-century art and architecture; and the history of photography. She has published widely on museum architecture and Pre-Raphaelite art. Her publications include the monograph Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (2006), the edited collections The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts (2003), Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext (with Tim Barringer, 2009) and Reconstructing Exhibitions in Art Institutions (with Natasha Adamou, 2023). She contributed an essay on George Stubbs’s The Anatomy of the Horse to the catalogue of the exhibition, “Le cheval en majesté: au coeur d’une civilisation” (Chateau de Versailles 2024). Her current research focuses on the work of George Stubbs, the horse, and the English landscape.

Dr Tessa Kilgarriff (she/her) is Curator of British Prints and Drawings (1775-1885) at the British Museum. Prior to the British Museum she was a Curator of Collections and Interiors at English Heritage (2019-2025) and Assistant Curator at Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village (2017-2019).   

Tessa’s doctoral thesis (National Portrait Gallery/University of Bristol) focused on theatrical portraiture in London, 1820-1860. She was a member of BAN’s Emerging Curators Group 2019-2020. Her current research interests include portrait lithography and theatrical caricatures.   

Isabel Seligman is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawing at the British Museum and was lead curator of the exhibition Hew Locke: what have we here? (British Museum, 2024). Other recent exhibitions and publications include Drawing Attention: emerging British artists (British Museum, 2022), Pushing Paper: Contemporary Drawing from 1970 to Now (Thames and Hudson, 2019), Lines of Thought: Drawing from Michelangelo to Now (Thames and Hudson, 2016) and contributions to David Hockney: Drawing from Life (National Portrait Gallery, 2020) and The American Dream: Pop to the Present (Thames and Hudson, 2017).  

Dr Jenny Wright is an independent artist-researcher specializing in the intersection of fine art practice, surgical pedagogy, and medical education. She earned her PhD from the University of the Arts London under the supervision of Deanna Petherbridge, where her doctoral research examined the drawing practices of medical professionals and students at King's College London Faculty of Dentistry, Oral and Craniofacial Sciences.  

Dedicated to cross-disciplinary collaboration, Jenny chairs the Innovations in Education Group, organizing annual colloquia with the Dental School at the University of Brescia, Italy, to build inter-professional health learning frameworks in alignment with WHO strategies. Her extensive clinical engagement has included developing patient-facing art workshops at Moorfields Eye Hospital, utilizing drawing activities to help patients articulate experiences of sight loss while training medical students in active listening and clinical empathy.  

As a practicing fine artist, Jenny’s studio work focuses on tracing the physical actions of surgical tools and visually recording the microscopic structures and spread of stage 2 and 3 cancer cells. Her research and artwork have been exhibited internationally across Britain, Finland, and at the Thinking through Drawingc onferences in the United States.  

Dr Claire Wintle is a historian of museums, exhibitions and collections with a particular interest in curatorial practice and the politics of representation. She teaches History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton, UK, where she developed the university’s MA Curating Collections and Heritage in collaboration with Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove. She is Director of Brighton’s Research Centre for Design History and holds an Honorary Professorship at Shiv Nadar University, India. Her research on curatorial drawing was shaped by a recent Visiting Associate Professorship in History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, and a Mid-Career Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) for British Art. 

Claire holds degrees in History, Museum Studies and Art History from the universities of Manchester and Sussex. She is founding co-editor of Manchester University Press’s new book series Histories of Museums and Collections. Her own books include Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Berghahn, 2013), Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945–70 (Manchester UP, 2016, co-edited with Ruth Craggs) and Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum: Makers, Process and Practice (Routledge, 2024, co-edited with Kate Guy and Hajra Williams). Her most recent monograph is Museums in the Wake of Empire: Global Collections in Post-war Britain, published by the PMC and Yale University Press in 2026.

Aimee Middlemiss is a social scientist whose knowledge comes from anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies, as well as personal experiences of pregnancy and pregnancy loss. She is a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter and holds a Wellcome Early Career Award in which she is investigating the reproductive politics of the cervical stitch, or cerclage, in the context of NHS England’s attempts to reduce preterm birth. Her previous research has concerned second trimester pregnancy loss including miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly, and the domestic use of foetal Doppler technology.

Seb Marshall is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of St Andrews. His research brings together approaches from cultural geography, the history of art and archaeology, and classical reception to study the rich corpus of sources produced by European travellers to the Mediterranean in the long nineteenth century. He is especially interested in the ways that powerful touristic discourses which continue to romanticise countries like Greece and Türkiye can be traced back to these visual and textual accounts. With a particular focus on representations of landscapes, his work revisits travellers’ publications, archival papers, sketches and photographs, to understand how their attempts to apprehend the Mediterranean past were mediated by the Mediterranean present. Previously he completed his PhD at Cambridge, supervised by the Classics Faculty and Art History Department, in which he studied the representation of Greek and Anatolian landscapes in Victorian illustrated travelogues. Since completing his PhD, he has held the British School at Athens’ Cary Studentship and the William St Clair Fellowship at the School of Advanced Studies in London. Beyond his work at St Andrews, he hopes to pursue a project to catalogue and digitise the travel sketchbooks of George Scharf from the Archive of the National Portrait Gallery.

Dr Louisa Smyllie-Peters is a Lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Trinity University, specialising in creative research methods, creative dissemination and research on the lived experiences of mental distress. Louisa recently joined the NIHR-funded Centre for Equity in Mental Health as co-lead for Psychosocial Interventions, where she explores arts and creativity as cultural practices for addressing mental health inequalities. Prior to her academic career, she spent ten years working in the arts and voluntary sectors and continues to engage in her own creative practice.

Alice Clanachan is Curator, Prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is responsible for prints in the V&A’s collection from 1500 to 1850, including Old Master prints and the national collection of wallpapers. In 2026 she established the Morris & Co. wallpaper network, a research project for which she is the lead. She is current managing a V&A touring exhibition of Lucian Freud’s etchings.

Her research interests include printed sources for eighteenth-century English ceramics, aspects of Northern Renaissance printmaking, botanical illustration, transnationalism and the artists’ colony in the nineteenth century, and works on paper which document voyages of discovery and empire, particularly the British and French colonial projects to the Antipodes.

She is invested in developing strategies for presenting decolonising narratives within contemporary museum practice. Prior to her move to the UK in 2023 she held curatorial roles in prints, drawings and photographs at the Art Gallery of South Australia and Flinders University Museum of Art in Adelaide, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Humaira Hossain is a PhD candidate in Art History at University of Illinois Chicago, specialising in modern and contemporary South Asian art. Her dissertation, “The Politics of Form: Abstraction, Identity, and Modernity in Bangladeshi Art”, examines how abstract art in Bangladesh emerged not simply as an aesthetic category but as a contested field through which artists negotiated nationhood, modernity, pedagogy and cultural authority in the decades after 1947. Framed across shifting institutional histories and transregional networks (1947–80), the project traces how abstraction formed a site where questions of identity and artistic autonomy were debated, authorised and revised. She holds an MA in art history from Louisiana State University and a BFA in art history from University of Dhaka. 

Her research has been presented at major venues including the Annual Conference on South Asia (University of Wisconsin–Madison), where she has presented on Rashid Choudhury (2024) and organised a panel on Bangladeshi-American artistic practices (2025), as well as at Florida State University’s Art History Graduate Symposium (2025). She is co-chair of the UIC Art History Graduate Student Symposium (Spring 2026). Her writing appears in exhibition catalogues and edited volumes, including a forthcoming chapter on Rashid Choudhury. Beyond the university, she is engaged with Bangladesh’s contemporary art ecosystem as an independent researcher, where she contributes research-driven catalogue texts across multiple projects.

Tal Horesh is a mathematician and draftswoman currently enrolled in the Master of Arts in Art and Science at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Angewandte). She holds a PhD in mathematics, awarded for her thesis “Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Counting Problems”, and has held postdoctoral positions at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES, France), the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, and ETH Zurich, with publications in leading journals in the field. 

Alongside her mathematical career, she has trained in academic drawing in Vienna and participated in workshops on contemporary drawing. Her current research examines drawing as a mode of knowledge formation at the intersection of mathematical and artistic practice.

Dr Excy Hansda (he/him) recently finished his PhD in Architectural History at the University of Liverpool, funded by the AHRC Northwest Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership. His PhD examines the history of suburbanisation, housing and the built environment in colonial Bombay, with particular attention to the role of Indian middle-class communities in shaping urban development during the early twentieth century. 

He is a licensed architect in India and now working as a researcher on colonial South Asia, and architectural representation using archival research and material and visual culture methodologies. He has worked on archival and heritage projects at the University of Liverpool, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Rugby School Archives. His research has been supported by grants from organisations including the Paul Mellon Centre, the Institute of Historical Research and the University of Liverpool. His work explores how visual and material sources, including architectural drawings, plans, maps and archives, can illuminate histories of the built environment and everyday life in colonial South Asia. 

He holds an MSc in Architectural Conservation from the University of Edinburgh, where he studied as a Commonwealth Master's Scholar, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee.

Nuno Grancho is an architect, researcher, teacher and historian of objects, buildings, cities and landscapes. His work examines how spatial practices of power and resistance, through the architectures and cities of struggle, shape the modernity and coloniality of South Asia from the early sixteenth century to the present day.

His research projects are focused on questions of human and material agency, the epistemology and the geopolitics of architecture and urbanism as a technique of social intervention.

Of particular importance to his work and writings are the spatial-morphological arrangements in architecture and cities that identify and enable the “private” as withdrawal from the world and the “public” as engagement with that same world and, simultaneously, the tension between these dichotomies. In 2014, he was a Visiting Researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Since 2017, he has been an Associate Researcher at DINÂMIA’CET-Iscte, University Institute of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal.

Dr Eliza Goodpasture is Research Fellow, Twentieth-Century British Drawings in the Department of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. She is also currently curating an exhibition on Ethel Sands as Guest Curator at the Charleston Trust, opening in March 2027. She received her PhD in 2024 from the University of York, under the supervision of Professor Elizabeth Prettejohn. Eliza has collaborated with arts institutions in the UK and US including Tate Britain, the National Gallery, the Henry Moore Institute, the Clark Institute, Leamington Spa Art Gallery, the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, and the Watts Gallery and Artists’ Village. Her publication record includes peer-reviewed scholarship, exhibition catalogue essays and journalistic criticism.

Artist Researcher Jo Doll is a disabled, Queer creative disruptor in the traditional arts space. Advocating for experience-based expertise recognition they regularly work with academic and heritage institutions to embed ethical approaches to creative health narratives. Jo is passionate about inclusive dissemination practices; they have provided lived experience consultation for various organisations including the Freud Museum, Mental Health Museum, Baring Foundation and Sheffield University.

Dr Katherine Gazzard is Curator of Art (Post-1800) at Royal Museums Greenwich. She has taught courses on art history and museum studies at the University of East Anglia. Her research focuses on British art, portraiture, uniforms and the cultural history of the Royal Navy. She is the author of The Art of Naval Portraiture, published in 2024.

Rose Forshall is an illustrator and lecturer at Falmouth University. Her knowledge comes from teaching the subject of illustration, illustration commissions and illustrating picture books, as well as the personal experience of pregnancy, early loss and difficulty conceiving. Rose has illustrated a number of picture books. Her latest practice-based research explores non-fiction narrative picture books for young audiences, exploring the gaps in history and how we translate those stories from history in words and pictures.

Stephen Feeke is an independent curator and scholar. He was previously a curator at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds and then Artistic Director at the New Art Centre, Roche Court, before embarking on a PhD on Hepworth’s bronzes at the Courtauld Institute in 2019 with Professor Jo Applin. During his research he received some funding from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for a trip to New York. He has published numerous texts, mostly on sculpture, and recently co-wrote the catalogue for Barbara Hepworth at the Rijksmuseum (2022) and the essay “String Theories” for Barbara Hepworth: Strings (2025). He is currently managing a public realm project at Paddington Square, London and is co-curator of Hepworth in Colour at the Courtauld Gallery.

Eve Ess is an artist whose practice encompasses processes of painting, drawing, writing and performance. Eve’s recent projects have turned to painterly abstraction, observational drawing, vocal mimesis and digital scanning as means to explore discomfort within scenes of intergenerational care.  

We die from the outside in explores the bodily and temporal distortions of “looking after”, particularly in relation to end-of-life care, observational drawing and mirroring. Works from the project are characterised by slippage and porosity across analogue and digital media, including a performative talk, “Instants in Withdrawing”, first delivered in 2023 for the Drawing Research Forum, Drawing Room, London, which extends ideas around care, liveness and labour from Because we love it so much, a script written and performed for a Writing Residency with CAMP in 2020. 

Before joining Arts University Plymouth as Senior Lecturer and course leader for BA Hons Painting, Drawing and Printmaking, Eve taught across fine art programmes at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. As an artist educator, Eve has worked with organisations such as the Slade, Chisenhale Gallery and Tate, contributing to the book In Site of Conversation (Tate Publishing, 2017). Eve’s PhD by practice in Painting at the Royal College of Art took Dora Maar's copy of Weeping Woman (1937) as a guide to researching aposiopetic gestures and ambivalent modes of study, with reference to feminist lessons and psychoanalytic theory. Eve has an MA in History of Art with Distinction from University College London.