Caterina Franciosi

Caterina Franciosi studies nineteenth-century British art in relation to histories of science, technology, and energy. Her dissertation, “Latent Light: Energy and Nineteenth-Century British Art,” examines how painting, material culture, and exhibition spaces registered and interrogated the regimes of fuel and labor that emerged with Britain’s rise as a fossil-fueled empire in the nineteenth century. Integrating histories of ecological degradation and scientific thought with those of labor movements and social injustice, her work focuses especially on representations of bodies that both sustained and resisted the violence of fossil capital.

Her doctoral research has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, where she was a Junior Fellow in 2025. She holds an MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where her dissertation on Edward Burne-Jones and Victorian geophysics received the Courtauld Prize for an Outstanding Dissertation, and a BA in Art History from John Cabot University in Rome.