Helen Pierce BA MA PhD (York)
Office: V/133
Telephone: 01904 433592
Email: hsp103@york.ac.uk
Research interests
Helen Pierce is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies.
Helen’s work focuses upon visual culture in early modern England and, in particular, its role in political debate during the first half of the seventeenth century. Her 2004 doctoral thesis, 'Unseemly Pictures: Political Graphic Satire in England, c.1600-c.1650', currently being revised for publication, addresses visual aspects of political culture neglected by historians of the period; her work similarly redresses an art historical bias privileging elite portraiture over printed media, and challenges the presence of a pervasive 'iconophobia' in post-Reformation English culture.
Helen has previously held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and will take up a short-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC in 2006.
Publications include
'A Dutch Devil in Derbyshire? Adaptation and Appropriation in a 1624 Broadside' in Tara Hamling and Richard Williams (eds.), Art Re-Formed? Re-Assessing the Impact of the Reformation on the Visual Arts, forthcoming.
'Images, Representation and Counter-Representation' in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol 1: Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
'Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire in 1620s England', The British Art Journal, 6:1 (2005), pp.159-65.
'Anti-Episcopacy and Graphic Satire in England, 1640-1645', The Historical Journal, 47:4 (2004), pp.809-48.
Entries for 'John Collet' (painter) and 'Theodore de Bry' (engraver) in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).