Biography

I was born in Paris and completed a BA and MPhil in History of Art at Cambridge. Alongside my academic interests, I served as president of the Cambridge Union, where my proudest achievement was the introduction of half-price memberships for students on bursaries, thus democratising access to the society. After my MPhil, I worked in London for an independent film production company. My PhD proposes to explore how Europeans depicted the peoples of the Pacific in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the first explorers returned from the Pacific, its inhabitants were represented as exotic and captivating Rousseauian ‘noble savages’. However, those depictions rapidly changed as the growing European Empires strove to assume racial and cultural superiority over them. These images reveal the dramatic shift from wonder at the Pacific and its peoples to disgust and distrust, from the perception of a noble to that of an ignoble ‘savage’, and ultimately from enlightenment to colonialism. I am currently the Vivmar Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery in London.