Professor Stana Nenadic receives Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship

Stana Nenadic, Professor of Social and Cultural History, has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a two-year project titled, ‘The Business of Art in Scotland c.1700-1900’.

The project, which will result in a book, interrogates the business of making and selling art in Scotland over two centuries, and has emerged from Professor Nenadic’s 2013-16 Leverhulme-funded project on artisans and craftworkers in nineteenth-century Scotland, which was focussed on the culture and economics of handwork in the age of machines.  Her earlier work on eighteenth-century portraits and engravings, as well as research on aspects of applied art and design in nineteenth-century textile industry, have also fed into this new project.

The project will focus on artists, including sculptors, as entrepreneurs and their engagement with clients or institutional patrons for public art, as well as exploring those businesses that supported art production, such as artists’ paint and materials makers, frame makers and engravers.  The study considers the business of buying and selling art and antiquities through agents, auctions and commercial galleries. It also looks at the businesses that supported amateur art.  The commercial and personal relationships that linked Edinburgh with local centres for art production, such as Aberdeen or Dumfries in the eighteenth century or Glasgow in the nineteenth century, will be used to illuminate processes of modernity in the creation, movement and consumption of a form of commodified culture. 

Professor Nenadic said, ‘It is a great honour to receive this award and a privilege to have two years for researching and writing on a subject that I find so fascinating.’

The School sends its warmest congratulations to Stana.

Professor Nenadic’s staff profile

Dr Nenadic awarded Leverhulme Trust Project Grant