ECRN & DRN: Transforming Your PhD Thesis into a Monograph

Kate Retford is Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on eighteenth-century British art, particularly on gender, portraiture, and the country house. Her recent publications include The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2017) and The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, co-edited with Susanna Avery-Quash (2019). She is currently working on a book about print rooms in eighteenth-century country houses, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2021–2022.

Altair Brandon-Salmon is a PhD candidate in art history at Stanford University, writing a dissertation on how bombsites in London shaped post-war British art and architecture. He obtained his undergraduate and masters degrees from the University of Oxford, where he was the curatorial assistant at Campion Hall. His essays have appeared in Art History.

Sam Bailey completed his PhD in French Literature and Disability Studies in 2022 and worked part-time in editorial roles for the Voltaire Foundation and Liverpool University Press between 2017 and 2022, as well as being a freelance translator and copy editor. He has since transitioned to a full-time position in digital publishing at Oxford University Press, working in acquisitions across the arts, humanities and social sciences. He commissions contributions to the Oxford Intersections programme, a born-digital collection of primary research articles that tackle global sociocultural challenges with ramifications in multiple disciplines. Key topics include racism, gender justice, environmental change and disability. He aims to make use of innovations in digital publishing to foster interdisciplinary conversations that would not be possible in the publishing of traditional books or journals. He is also part of the ECR Working Group, ensuring that OUP can cater for the specific needs of ECRs and help them achieve their career goals.  

Meredith Gamer is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she specialises in the art and visual culture of Britain and the Atlantic world. Her work has appeared in Sculpture Journal and Journal18 and in a number of edited volumes and exhibition catalogues, including William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum (2018) and Hogarth and Europe (2022). In 2014, she co-curated, with Esther Chadwick and Cyra Levenson, the exhibition Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain at the Yale Center for British Art. Her first monograph, “City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London”, is forthcoming with the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC)/Yale University Press. With the support of a PMC Mid-Career Fellowship, she is currently at work on a new book-length project, which focuses on the intersection of art, medicine and gender in the British Atlantic world.