Holly Marsden

Holly Marsden is an assistant research curator at Historic Royal Palaces, based at Kensington Palace. Her PhD, born out of a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between the University of Winchester and Historic Royal Palaces (2024), examined how Queen Mary II curated and presented her political identity through portraiture, architecture, and court culture. This was analysed against what can be gleaned of her personal identity, taken from correspondence, memoirs, and diaries. As well as the fields of queenship and seventeenth-century art history and material culture, Holly’s research also looks at ‘lesbian-like’ (Judith Bennet) women in the early modern period, having studied Queer History at Goldsmiths. Holly has worked on exhibitions for Historic Royal Palaces and the National Portrait Gallery, and publications include a article on the depiction of Mary II bare-breasted on commemorative ceramics for the English Ceramic Circle’s Transactions (2025) and on queerness at the Georgian court for the exhibition catalogue of Kensington Palace’s ‘Crown to Couture’ exhibition (2023).