UCL History of Art welcomes new History of Art, Materials and Technology lecturer Dr Tea Ghigo

Tea Ghigo is a Heritage Scientist who specialises in the material characterisation of pigments and painting (or writing) supports using non-invasive analytical methods.

Tea started her academic path at the University of Turin (Italy), where she studied art history. During her undergraduate studies, she became increasingly interested in the materials used across heritage collections, a topic she felt was often left at the margin of the academic art historical discourse. Her curiosity and interest in science and technology made her specialise in the material characterisation of heritage objects through her Master’s at the University of Genova (Italy), which she completed in 2014. In 2020 she obtained her PhD as a cotutelle between the University of Hamburg (field: archaeometry) and La Sapienza, Rome (field: history and archaeology). Thanks to this unique experience, Tea became proficient in leveraging material analyses conducted on heritage collections with different spectroscopic methods to explore technical, historical and cultural questions.

Stemming from this interdisciplinary background, Tea’s research combines material analyses with traditional archival research to expand and nuance our understanding and appreciation of museum collections. She has worked on various materials and historical periods, including ancient papyri, Medieval illuminated codices and Victorian watercolours.

Tea has formed part of the research team of two prestigious European Research Council-funded international projects based at La Sapienza in Rome and La Sorbonne in Paris. She is presently a Research Heritage Scientist at the Ashmolean Museum, working on a Leverhulme Trust-funded project she designed and authored. She is also a Fellow of Linacre College at Oxford University and serves as a Project Reviewer for the Cultural Heritage panel of the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source (Science and Technology Facility Council, UKRI).

Alongside her research, Tea is deeply involved in Public Engagement. Her long-term goal is to broaden the representation of objects’ materiality within museum narratives. She is presently working on different displays centring on the pigments available to artists post-Industrial Revolution and aims to leverage the information from scientific analyses to humanise display contents.

Tea is thrilled she will soon have the opportunity to share her expertise with UCL’s student body. She hopes she will succeed in inspiring the next generation of museum curators and cultural professionals to consider materiality as an inherent part of any narrative built around heritage collections.