Sarah Hook
DPhil Candidate in English
University of Oxford
Wolfson College
Linton Road
Oxford, OX2 6UD
sarah.hook’at’wolfson.ox.ac.uk
Period: 19th – century portraiture
Medium: Painting, Photography, Prints, Watercolours, Miniatures & Pastels
Theme: Collectors & Collections, Costume in portraits, Learning & Participation, Libraries, Archives & other research resources, Medical Portraiture, Military/Naval & Professional portraiture, Race & Nationality, Regional British portraiture, The Art Market, Women artists
Career summary
Sarah completed her degree in Art History and English (MA Joint Hons) at the University of St Andrews in 2012, before coming to Oxford to complete the Masters in English Language and Literature (1800-1914) at Worcester College. She is currently working on her doctoral project, titled ’Reading the Gallery: Portraits and Texts in the Mid- to Late Nineteenth Century’ (tbc), at Wolfson College. Her doctoral study is kindly funded by a scholarship provided in conjunction with The Wolfson Foundation. Alongside her doctoral research, Sarah works as Books Editor for Victorian Network.
Areas of interest / research
The interdisciplinary study of literature and the visual arts across nineteenth-century culture, particularly related to portraiture; Victorian art writing; the Victorian (portrait) gallery space and nineteenth-century cultures of collecting; the literary portrait gallery in print; nineteenth-century photographic card portraits and their representation in literature.
Details of books/publications relating to your work on British portraiture
Hook, Sarah, ‘“An Imaginative Woman”: A Photograph Without an Original’, in The Thomas Hardy Society Journal, 8.2 (Summer 2012), pp. 38-50.