Biographical details

Kate Retford joined the Department of History of Art and Screen Media as Lecturer in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century art in October 2003.

Her PhD on representations of the family in eighteenth-century Britain, awarded in 2000, was interdisciplinary, based in both the History of Art and History departments at the University of Warwick. While completing her thesis, she worked as research assistant on a project entitled 'The Professionalisation of Medicine in the British Isles, 1650-1850' at the University of Oxford, the basis for a book published by Oxford University Press.

From 2000 until 2003, Kate held a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She has taught in the History of Art departments at Warwick and Richmond, the American International University in London, as well as in both the History and History of Art faculties at Cambridge.

Kate's book, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England, was published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press in March 2006, and was runner-up for the Longman History Today Book Award that year. In addition, she has written a number of articles and given papers on topics relating to eighteenth-century portraiture, gender, and the country house art collection. She was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship in the History of Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in October 2006 in order to begin work on a new book on the conversation piece.

Kate is co-organiser of the Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group, with Luisa Cale from English and Humanities, and Anna Richards and Ann Lewis from European Cultures and Languages.