Carey Gibbons

Carey Gibbons completed her Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her dissertation, “The Limits of the Body in Victorian Illustration: Arthur Hughes and Frederick Sandys,” focuses on the illustrations of Hughes and Sandys, artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. The dissertation examines the ways in which the two artists conceive of the body and the self in terms of movement beyond limits or boundaries, positioning Hughes’s preoccupation with the transformative and multiple properties of the body against Sandys’s interest in the body’s expansion and replication. Her approach crosses disciplines, engaging with illustrations in relation to Victorian art, literature, science, religion, and gender constructions. She is currently developing her dissertation research into a book exploring Pre-Raphaelite drawing and illustration, working closely with the collection of The Morgan Library & Museum while serving as the Morgan’s 2021–22 Drawing Institute Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

In addition to her work in the field of Victorian illustration, she has taken on a variety of projects that have allowed her to develop her broader interest in illustration and works on paper. She co-curated the exhibition, “Enchanted Vision: The Arthur Rackham Collection,” at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library in 2018. From 2016-17 she worked as a Curatorial Fellow at the Fisk University Galleries in Nashville, where she curated the exhibition, “Prentiss Taylor Lithographs: Shifting Viewpoints.”

Additionally, she is a member of CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts and is dedicated to highlighting the work of women artists and designers. She is currently finalizing publications related to the female Pre-Raphaelite artist Evelyn De Morgan and the Scottish illustrator Jessie Marion King.

She is interested in online forms of engagement with art and design and is the Digital Art History Editor for the journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. Additionally, she has experience working at a variety of museums, including the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She also has experience teaching art and design history courses at the Courtauld Institute of Art, New York City College of Technology, Belmont University, and Memphis College of Art.

B.A., Art History, Columbia University
M.A., History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art
Ph.D., History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art