Graduate Program Director Graduate Program DirectorAssociate Professor
Catherine Roach is an Associate Professor of Art History in the School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University. She researches eighteenth-and nineteenth-century art, with a focus on Britain and the British Empire and on the histories of exhibition and display.
She teaches courses in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European art, museum studies, writing for art history, and methods for art history. She advises MA Qualifying Papers on museum studies, the history of exhibitions, and art in Britain, Europe, and the United States between 1750 and 1900. Recent topics include photographic archives of nineteenth-century English hospitals for the mentally ill, a Yoko Ono exhibition at VCU’s Anderson Gallery, and needlework artist Mary Linwood’s displays in nineteenth-century London.
In 2010, she curated Seeing Double: Portraits, Copies and Exhibitions in 1820s London at the Yale Center for British Art. Her first book, Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain, received the Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period after 1800. To support work on her second book, “The British Institution: Art, Power, and Display in Nineteenth-Century London,” she was awarded fellowships at the Huntington Library and the National Humanities Center.
She holds a BA from Yale University and a PhD in art history from Columbia University.
Books:
“The British Institution: Art, Power, and Display in Nineteenth-Century London” (In preparation)
Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London and New York: Ashgate/Routledge, 2016; Paperback edition, 2018)
(Winner of the Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period after 1800; Reviewed in: caa.reviews; Visual Culture in Britain; Pre-Raphaelite Society Journal; Victorian Studies)
Articles:
“Naming Rights: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sitters of Color, and the Limits of Knowledge,” in preparation (co-authored with Jessie Park)
“Susannah Cibber, Creator,” in Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume 2: Creators, edited by Indu Jain, Jill Lane, Elliot Gordon Mercer (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, forthcoming 2026) (co-authored with Joseph Roach)
“Dog Shows: Porcelain Pugs and Pre-Raphaelite Painters in Thomas Earl’s Art and Nature,” Huntington Library Quarterly 87, no 2 (Summer 2024): 273–290.
“‘The Higher Branches’: Genre and Race on Display at the British Institution, London, 1806,” Art History 44, issue 2 (April 2021): 312–340
“‘My Hero’: Women and the Domestic Display of Marine Paintings,” in Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting, ed. Eleanor Hughes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 112–133
“Images as Evidence? Morse and the Genre of Gallery Painting,” in Samuel F.B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre and the Art of Invention, ed. Peter John Brownlee (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 4-59
“Domestic Display and Imperial Identity: A Visual Record of the Art Collections of Edward Hawke Locker,” Huntington Library Quarterly 75, no. 3 (Autumn 2012): 411–428
“Taking Pictures: Looting, Preservation, and Photography during World War II,” Museum History Journal 2, no. 2 (July 2009): 163–180
“The Artist in the House of His Patron: Images-within-Images in John Everett Millais’s Portraits of the Wyatt Family,” Visual Culture in Britain 9, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 1–20
“The Foundling Restored: Emma Brownlow King, William Hogarth, and the Public Image of the Foundling Hospital in the Nineteenth Century,” British Art Journal 9, no. 2 (Autumn 2008): 40–49
Edited Collections:
“Paintings, Peepshows, and Porcupines: Exhibitions in London, 1763–1851,” Huntington Library Quarterly 87, no 2 (Summer 2024) (co-edited with Jordan Bear)
“Commentaries: Art Institutions and Race in the Atlantic World, 1750–1850,” American Art 36, no. 2 (Summer 2022) (co-edited with Nika Elder and Daryle Williams)