Esther Chadwick

Dr. Esther Chadwick is a Lecturer in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century British art within global contexts, particularly its connections to transatlantic enslavement and cross-cultural encounters. She has held prestigious fellowships at institutions including the Paul Mellon Centre and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

• Education: University of Cambridge (BA), Yale University (PhD, 2016)

Chadwick’s work interrogates the political agency of art during revolutions, the materiality of printed images, and the visual culture of colonialism. Her 2024 monograph, The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, explores how printmaking shaped artistic criticality and won the 2025 IFPDA Foundation Book Award.

She has co-curated major exhibitions such as Entangled Pasts, 1768-now (Royal Academy, 2024) and William Blake’s Universe (Fitzwilliam Museum, 2024), and her recent publications analyze topics like Haitian postrevolutionary aesthetics and Indigenous London. A committed educator, she teaches courses on portraiture, radical art, and the global print.

• Scientific Awards:
  • IFPDA Foundation Book Award (2025)
  • Paul Mellon Centre Fellowship (London)
  • Huntington Library Fellowship (California)
  • Lewis Walpole Library Fellowship (Connecticut)
  • CASVA Fellowship (Washington D.C.)

Chadwick supervises PhD students including Damiët Schneeweisz (history of portrait miniatures in the Atlantic) and Claire Ó Nualláin (antiquarianism in eighteenth-century Ireland). Her curatorial projects and writings emphasize decolonizing art history and recontextualizing imperial legacies.