Ailsa Boyd holds a PhD from University of Glasgow and MLitt (Museum Studies) from University of St Andrews. She is an independent lecturer, editor, curator and writer on 19th-century art, design and literature.
Previously a Research Assistant for several University of Glasgow projects including ‘The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler’, and assistant curator at the Hunterian Art Gallery and Collins Gallery (University of Strathclyde); since 2006 she has had a concurrent career in university administration at the University of Glasgow. She co-founded a contemporary art consultancy (Hunter Fine Art) and has collaborated with Scottish contemporary artists and collectives. She regularly lectures on the interior design, architecture and art history of the long 19th century, with a particular focus on the intersection of interior design and literature, women artists, the Arts and Crafts home, Scottish art and architecture, America’s Gilded Age, and the art market. Academic journal articles include: a survey of Beatrix Whistler; manuals of household taste; Henry James on art; and Edith Wharton’s interior design. She is currently completing a monograph, Identity and Domestic Space in Victorian Literature: Houses and Fictions in George Eliot, Henry James and Edith Wharton, and researching the Glasgow architect Robert Duncan.
