PMC Book Night

Esther Chadwick is a lecturer in art history at the Courtauld, where she specialises in eighteenth-century British art. She studied art history at the University of Cambridge and completed her doctorate at Yale University in 2016. Before joining the Courtauld, she was a curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. Esther’s research addresses the materiality and agency of printed images, the role of art in the age of revolutions and the visual culture of the circum-Atlantic world. She is working on a book that examines the formative role of printmaking in the work of British artists of the late eighteenth century. Exhibition projects have included Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain (Yale Center for British Art, 2014) and A Revolutionary Legacy: Haiti and Toussaint Louverture (British Museum, 2018).

Ian Dudley is a Visiting Fellow in Art History at the University of Essex. His research focuses on relationships between histories of art and empire from the early modern period to the present. Recent work includes a study of Olmec colossal heads in the paintings of Aubrey Williams, published in Art History, and an examination of slavery visualisation in the sculpture of Stanley Greaves, published in Third Text. His 2017 doctoral thesis investigated Edward Goodall’s Sketches in British Guiana within the context of colonial geography and anthropology during the 1830–40s. He also curated the exhibition Southern Press: Prints from Brazil, Paraguay and Chile with the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA) at Firstsite gallery, Colchester.

Mark Laird is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and former faculty member at Harvard University. He is the author of The Flowering of the Landscape Garden and A Natural History of English Gardening – recipient of an Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award. He has been historic planting consultant to Painshill Park Trust, English Heritage and Strawberry Hill Trust.