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PhDone | My Research on Angelica Kauffman

I began writing this post at the end of 2024 and suddenly, we’re in the middle of January 2025! As it happens, it is also the 10th anniversary of Wording Art! I can’t believe I have upkept this blog for the last ~10 years~ and it has seen me through so many of my art and life adventures!

2024 was so topsy-turvy I honestly haven’t really put my mind to reflecting on what I have achieved or experienced this year. To celebrate the end of 2024, new beginnings, and 10 years of Wording Art, I should acknowledge my major milestone of 2024, which was completing my PhD in art history!

I have shared at different points about my experience pursuing a PhD at NTU Singapore. It’s funny how time flies and I graduated in July 2024. Yet with all of the strange feels of post-submission, post-defence, and post-graduation, and moving on to a new chapter in life, it felt like I needed more time to finally share about being PhDone.

| Cover picture: Me staring at the wonderful shelves of books on British Art in Hatchards, Piccadilly, London |

My PhD Research on Angelica Kauffman: The Last Stages

Over the last 5 years, I have spent many hours thinking, researching, and writing about the Swiss-Austrian artist Angelica Kauffman. My PhD research focused on Kauffman’s self-portraits from her London period (1766–1781), considering how these images tell us about the ways she viewed herself as a professional female artist in late eighteenth-century London. That’s the one-line summary!

Precious moments viewing Angelica Kauffman’s Self-Portrait, c. 1770–75, on display at the Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520–1920 exhibition, Tate Britain

Writing up my dissertation in 2022-23 was both enlightening and frustrating. But that, to me, is really what writing is all about. Figuring out how to structure my chapters, subheadings, flow, which images should go where, titles… There was a lot to learn and experiment with, and I’m so glad I had an entire year all to myself just to focus on writing. It’s a rare experience to have dedicated time for writing, and to be given feedback on my dissertation by supervisors and a panel of examiners alike.

2024 started with me working on revisions on my dissertation, before prepping for an oral defence. I had to condense years of research and hundreds of pages into a 30-minute presentation, before fielding questions by the examiners. I think the word ‘defence’ is especially apt here, because at points it did feel like I had to ‘defend’ my arguments and ideas. My defence was held online, which I did not expect! It’s funny how so many events can now be held online in a post-covid world…

Two weeks after my defence, I flew to London to see the Angelica Kauffman exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, which you can also read more about in my blog post. It felt like the most fitting way to bring my PhD chapter to a close! Other than at the Royal Academy, I saw more of Kauffman’s works at the Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520–1920 exhibition at Tate Britain. I also visited the gorgeous, revamped National Portrait Gallery to view what is probably Kauffman’s most famous self-portrait from her London period.

Self-Portraits by Angelica Kauffman, Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds (left) on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London

Graduation and Moving On…

Luckily things went well, and I made it for graduation! It really was the best day~~

Just two photos with my PhD graduation gown and bonnet, out of the 100000 photos that I took with my family!

I think with the completion of the PhD, there’s a strange feeling of finding my footing again. After months of tracking my hours of writing every day, it felt like I needed to reset and find a new routine again. I’ve seen only a few people online acknowledge this post-PhD limbo — and it’s so real! At this point of writing, I’m so glad to have moved through this stage, and I have now started a new job. Perhaps a bit shockingly, it’s bittersweet to me that I might miss a bit of PhD life in some ways.

Guest Post & Podcast Episode

With that, I’m happy to bring my PhD chapter to a proper close in 2024. While I haven’t shared much of my actual research on this blog, I have had the opportunity to share about it on other platforms!

In June 2024, I wrote a guest post on Art Herstory about Angelica Kauffman and her works centred on art, music and poetry. In this post, I explore some of my new, personal favourites among Kauffman’s artworks. I didn’t discuss most of these images in my dissertation, so it was nice to have another platform to write about a different aspect of Kauffman’s oeuvre. I would love it if you go here to read my guest post Angelica Kauffman: Art, Music and Poetry.

In November 2024, I spoke on a podcast episode with High Impact Thesis, a platform that hosts a diverse selection of researchers from NTU Singapore. In this one-hour long episode, I talk about my research on Angelica Kauffman’s London self-portraits, as well as:
🏛 What led me into art history and my research topic on Kauffman
🎨 Kauffman’s motivations in moving to London in her twenties
👩‍🎨 Women artists in eighteenth-century London and how they were perceived then and now
🗽 Allegory, Muses, and the art of imitation
🖼 Kauffman’s practice of imitation in her self-portraits (like the one at the National Portrait Gallery pictured below), and the particular influence of Raphael

I would love it if you would like to listen to my podcast episode on Spotify at this link!

A very happy me finally viewing Angelica Kauffman’s self-portrait in the National Portrait Gallery for the first time!

Certainly though, it’s not yet the end of the road for me and my research on Kauffman! After spending years reading, thinking, writing, and discussing her artworks, my interest and passion about Kauffman is still as strong as ever. Maybe this is the true sign of having completed a PhD — that you don’t really get tired of talking about a specialised subject again and again… And the best part is that I can now officially say that I’m a bona fide art historian! 😉

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