Isobel Elstob is Assistant Professor in Art History at the University of Nottingham. Her research explores how contemporary artists engage with historical process, objects and narratives. Isobel’s work applies literary and historiographic models, such as intertextuality and metafiction, to the study of a broad range of visual media including installation, painting and photography. Isobel is currently working on the book project Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), which examines how recent artists revive Victorian visual technologies, such as magic lanterns, deploy taxidermy as a contemporary medium, and re-present overlooked female histories and colonial narratives centred on Nigerian and Caribbean relations with Britain. She is also currently developing this research into an exhibition.
Isobel sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Fiction and the advisory board for Languages, Texts, and Society. She has contributed to panel discussions and given keynote lectures and conference presentations and directed art engagement events for galleries and museums. Her publications include contributions to the essay collection Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World (2019) and articles in Visual Studies (2020), the Journal of Victorian Culture (2017) and the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies (2018).
