Postgraduate Profile Priscilla Sonnier

Biography: Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, Priscilla has a BA in Art History from Oklahoma State University and her MA in Art History from the University of Oklahoma.

She has spent over ten years working in museum education and collections at fine art and historical institutions in Canada and the United States.

Research: Priscilla’s project, Celebrated Beauties: Dialogues, Duty, and Desire in Georgian Ireland (1730-90), re-examines how the representation, collection, and reception of aristocratic female portraits shaped social identity in Ascendancy Ireland. This interdisciplinary project builds upon prior art historical scholarship to present tantalizing new perspectives into the roles, meanings, and display of Anglo-Irish and Irish women through material and visual culture in Ireland during the eighteenth century. Its goal is not to subjectively argue for an all-encompassing ‘Irish’ artistic style for female portraiture during the period; but rather to analyze how the likenesses of elite women were utilized to express Anglo-Irish narratives of socio-economic, political, and cultural dominance. She argues that noblewomen’s images suggestively shaped Anglo-Irish social identity through patriotic causes; such as linen manufacture and industry, familial legacy, exhibition, and the sensibility of polite education to further the ascendancy’s ambitions to be recognized as a ‘civilized’ and stable society. Her project reveals how the collection, dress, and gendered display of Ireland’s noblewomen visually communicated their idealism, influence, and involvement with Anglo-Irish cultural objectives to their Irish audiences—all while reflecting the multi-faceted lives of the women they represent.

Her research has been generously supported by The Sir Alfred Beit Research Bursary and Russborough House, The Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust, UCD Graduate College of Arts and Humanities, and the UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy. She is also a member of the UCD Humanities Institute.

Keywords: Ireland; Eighteenth-century; Women; Portraiture; Visual Culture

Contact: (opens in a new window)priscilla.sonnier@ucdconnect.ie

Supervisor: Associate Professor Conor Lucey

Professional Activities:

• Co-Organizer, UCD HI PhD Conference ‘Belonging and Migration in Emerging Scholarship: Concepts, Perceptions, Experiences, and Representations’, UCD Humanities Institute, November 2019.
• Conference paper: ''Respectable Entertainment': Self Fashioned Myth, Mask, and Exhibition at London’s Vauxhall Gardens and Royal Academy', Liberal Arts Collective, 'Visualizing the Self in Flux' Conference, Pennsylvania State University, October 2019.
• Conference paper: 'Playful Pantheon: Self-Fashioned Sexual Narratives in Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Musters as Hebe and Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces', Sixth Feminist Art History Conference, American University, September 2018.