Esme Garlake

Academic position: PhD Research Student

Department: History of Art

Biography:

Esme Garlake is a climate activist and first-year PhD candidate at UCL in History of Art, fully funded by the university’s Research Excellence Scholarship and supervised by Professor Alison Wright. Her research investigates the material and artistic representations of nonhuman life in early sixteenth-century Italy, exploring the possibilities and complexities of interactions between human and nonhuman animals at the time, as well as what it means to study this topic from today’s context of the climate emergency. Esme completed her Masters in History of Art at The Courtauld in 2021, where she wrote her thesis on depictions of nonhuman animals in the art of Giovanni da Udine and Giulio Romano.

Research Projects:

Towards an Ecocritical Art History, article for Environmental History Now