Rebecca Senior

I am a researcher specialising in sculpture and visual cultures in Britain. I have a particular interest in allegory, monuments and histories of British imperialism, which is the subject of my current Postdoctoral Fellowship. Working in collaboration with the University of Nottingham, the project is titled ‘Allegories of Violence: Histories of the British Empire and Monumental Sculpture’, and explores the various manifestations of allegorical sculpture on monuments erected in honour of Britain’s imperial campaigns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a specific focus on how allegory occupied a unique space as a sanitiser of violence in visual histories.

My doctoral research explored the significance of allegory and monumental sculpture as sites of sociopolitical, cultural and imperial memory between 1760 and 1840, which I am currently preparing for publication. By proposing funerary monuments as a canvas for allegorical expression, this work presents allegory as a performative, three-dimensional phenomenon, which was used to evoke, erase and manipulate Britain’s imperial histories of violence during this period.