Emily Cox

Emily Cox is a fourth-year PhD Candidate in the History of Art specializing in nineteenth-century European art with a particular focus on France, Britain, and Russia. Her dissertation re-imagines the relationship between art and politics in the fin de siècle. An “intellectual history of objects,” her project casts a transnational gaze across 1890s cultural forms — wallpaper, ceramics, paintings, novels, treatises — to argue that the period’s critical and aesthetic possibility lay in its fundamental interdisciplinarity. Her research questions center on radicality, periodization, and form; discipline and disciplinarity; ekphrastic writing and critical theory; and the historiography of modernism. 

Emily holds a BA with Highest Honors from the University of Virginia and an M.St. from the University of Oxford, where she held an Ertegun Graduate Scholarship in the Humanities. Her work has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the U.S. Department of Education, the Decorative Arts Trust, the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, and by the European Studies Council at Yale.