Sarah Birt

Career summary

Graduated from the University of Birmingham in 2005 with a joint honours degree in History and History of Art, followed by an MA in the History of Britain from Birkbeck College in 2013. I commenced my studies as a PhD candidate at Birkbeck in October 2016. I worked at the National Portrait Gallery from 2008 until 2015 and at Chelsea College of Arts from 2015 to present.

Areas of interest / research

I am primarily interested in the social, economic and cultural contributions made by women in early modern Britain focusing on the work of female artists, particularly the portraitist Mary Beale, placing her life and work in context with her seventeenth-century contemporaries. I am currently researching mantua-makers, milliners and seamstresses in seventeenth and eighteenth-century London with reference to costume in the portraiture of the period.