Sheila O’Connell

Sheila O’Connell studied art history at Birkbeck, University of London (BA, 1979) and was Andrew Mellon Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, 1985-86. She spent thirty years as curator of British prints at the British Museum. Her main publications were connected with exhibitions: The Popular Print in England (1999); London 1753 (2003); Britain Meets the World 1714-1830 (at the Forbidden City, Beijing, 2007); Bonaparte and the British: prints and propaganda in the age of Napoleon (with Tim Clayton, 2015). She also oversaw the on-line cataloguing of about 250,000 British prints. Since retiring in 2015 she has edited twelve books on London history for the London Topographical Society. Her most recent research has been for an article on Mary Darly (1736-91), known as the first professional woman cartoonist, published in The Imprint of Women (eds. C. Martinez and C. Roman, 2024).