Emma Mason

Doctoral Student

Emma has an interdisciplinary background, with a BA in English Language and Literature (King’s College London, 2014) and an MA in Eighteenth Century Studies (University of York, 2023). Her research interest in the refugees and emigrants from the French Revolution began with her MA thesis, which examined charitable efforts for the émigrés that were led by British women.

She is completing her PhD part-time alongside her career and has held roles in heritage, with the National Trust, and the Higher Education sector. When not working on her PhD, she is Knowledge Exchange Manager in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Sheffield.

Emma’s AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Project with the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Fitzwilliam Museum is titled ‘Collecting the Counter-Revolution: Refugees, Religion and Anglo-French Politics in the Library of Richard, Viscount Fitzwilliam (1745-1816)’. The upheavals of the French Revolution displaced both people and things: émigrés left France in search of safety abroad, and collections in private houses and religious communities were broken up and scattered across the continent.

Emma is investigating Fitzwilliam’s engagement with the events of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era across several domains within his Library: through his own, anonymously published, writings on theology and political economy, and through the material evidence of his printed book, manuscript and print collections, which contain vital evidence about his immersion in émigré networks, and counter-revolutionary and counter-Enlightenment thought.

She is supervised by Dr Tom Stammers and Dr Esther Chadwick at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Elenor Ling and Dr Suzanne Reynolds at the Fitzwilliam Museum.