XClose

History of Art

Home
Menu

Rebecca Whiteley

Rebecca Whiteley

rebecca.whiteley.12@ucl.ac.uk

I graduated from my BA in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford in 2011. I completed my MA in the History of Art department at UCL in 2013 and returned to the department in 2014 to start my PhD.

Thesis

Picturing Pregnancy: A History of the Early Modern Birth Figure

Images showing fetal presentations during labour, called birth figures, were regularly printed in midwifery and surgical books from the mid-sixteenth to at least the late-eighteenth century in England. Despite the centrality of these images to midwifery practice in the early modern period, very little critical attention has been paid to them.

My research aims to place these images in their historical context and to understand how they both reflected and affected how viewers envisioned and understood the pregnant body and the unborn child. The period of my research spans the rise of obstetrics, the domination of the field by male practitioners and the medicalisation of the pregnant and labouring body. My thesis will demonstrate that close analysis of birth figures can throw light on and enrich our histories of childbirth, midwifery and the body during this period of enormous change.

Research Interests

My research interests include social art history, print history, print culture and histories of medical and scientific imagery. As well as my PhD research into early modern images of the pregnant body and the foetus in utero, I have worked on the Little Gidding concordances and am interested in the unusual and creative techniques for collaging prints employed by this community in the early seventeenth century.

Awards

Winner of the Roy Porter Student Essay Prize, 2015, awarded by the Society for the Social History of Medicine. Paper to be published in the Social History of Medicine journal.

3 month research fellowship at the Huntington Library, Los Angeles. Awarded by the International Placement Scheme, AHRC.

Publications

Articles

'Figuring Pictures and Picturing Figures', Social History of Medicine, 2017. Winning essay for the Roy Porter Student Essay Prize (2015). https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkx082

'The Limits of Seeing and Knowing: Early Modern Anatomy and the Uterine Membranes', Object, 2017. http://ojs.lib.ucl.ac.uk/index.php/OBJ/article/view/1821

Online Content

'Images on the move in Mauriceau's The Diseases of Women' on Wellcome Collection Early Medicine Blog, 08/11/2016. http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2016/11/images-on-the-move-in-francois-mauriceaus-the-diseases-of-women/

''The birth of mankind' and the revolutionary image of the foetus in utero' on Wellcome Collection Early Medicine Blog, 11/06/2015. http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2015/06/the-birth-of-mankind-and-the-revolutionary-image-of-the-foetus-in-utero/

'The Little Gidding Concordance: Case Study' on Royal Collection website. https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/about/books-and-manuscripts/little-gidding

Conference Papers

Panel Convenor, 'Body as Architecture/Architecture as Body', AAH Annual Conference, London, April 2018.

'Materiality and Liminality in Early Modern Images of the Uterine Membranes', conference paper at Pregnant Archives, Birkbeck, London, December 2017.

'The Limits of Seeing and Knowing: Early Modern Anatomy and the Uterine Membranes', paper at Postgraduate Work in Progress Symposium, Department of History of Art, UCL, May 2017.

'Diagrams in early modern midwifery: problems in the construction and communication of new kinds of body knowledge', conference paper at Diagrammatic: Beyond Inscription?, CRASSH, Cambridge, December 2016.

'Touch, sight and the problems of knowing: exploring an early modern preoccupation with images of the fetus in the uterine membranes', talk at the Huntington Library, California, October 2016.

'Fetal fruit, maternal tree: analogical thinking about the pregnant body and the unborn child in seventeenth-century England', paper at Scientiae conference, Oxford, July 2016.

'Images of practice, images in practice: The role of birth figures in Justine Siegemund's The Court Midwife of the Electorate of Brandenburg', invited talk at Medicinsk Museion, Copenhagen, February 2016.

'Figuring pictures and picturing figures: early modern images of the unborn child and the pregnant body', invited paper at Women's History Seminar Series, Institute of Historical Research, October 2015.

'Revealing the secrets of the body: early modern images of the lying-in chamber and the foetus in utero', at Know Thyself conference, History of Art Department, UCL, May 2015.

Other roles

In 2017 I co-edited issue 19 of the departmental research journal Object