Close
PhD Supervisor: Bob Mills (primary), Alison Wright (subsidiary)
Working Title: Women’s Work? Textiles, Power and Identity in Late Fifteenth-Century Castile
My PhD explores the role of textiles (real and imagined) in navigating themes of power and difference in late fifteenth-century Castile. Specifically, I am interested in the associations between gender and the acts of making, using, visualising and writing about textiles at the court of Isabel I of Castile (1474-1504). Isabel’s court oversaw great socio-political change, necessitating large-scale patronage campaigns that promoted her royal authority and Christian power. Textiles could be hung, draped, or wrapped to transform and divide spaces (both literal and divine), and used to extend, elevate, amplify or create structures from the body that wore them. These processes were deliberate acts of identity-construction that required the allocation of financial, material, and intellectual resources that merit their analysis alongside ‘monumental’ forms of patronage such as architecture, sculpture and painting. As a woman ruler, such acts were also informed by the codes, expectations and limitations of gender, particularly in the context of a medium associated, both contemporarily and anachronistically, with women. As portable luxury goods, textiles also provide scope for the analysis of ‘territorial’ space. Isabel’s court was a converging centre of patronage for two prominent textile industries; those of the Nasrid and Burgundian kingdoms. Examining the status, interaction and local significance of imported objects, some seemingly more ‘foreign’ than others, allows for greater insight into concepts of power and conquest in a period of rapid colonial expansion.
My PhD is fully funded by UCL’s Research Excellence Scholarship
Conference Papers
- ‘The Medals of Mary I’, Arte Poder, y Genero Conference VI, Universidad de Murcia, Spain, April 2023.
- ‘Like Mother, Like Daughter? The Visual Culture of Mary I’, 500 years of a Christian Woman International Seminar, Cervantes Institute, London, January 2023.
Awards
- Research Excellence Scholarship 2024
- British Archaeological Association Research Award 2023
- Goodenough Scholar 2021
- Trinity College Dublin Gold Medallist 2020
- Naylor Downes Award 2020
- Homan Potterton Prize 2019
