Meredith Gamer

18th- and 19th-Century European Art
Ph.D., Yale University
MA, Courtauld Institute of Art 

Curriculum Vitae

Meredith Gamer studies the art and visual culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, with a focus on Britain and the Atlantic world. Her research and teaching address histories of power and the body, punishment and empire, gender and medicine, and print and popular culture. 

Gamer is the author of City of the Gallows (forthcoming with Yale University Press), which explores the relationship between art and the spectacle of public execution in eighteenth-century London. Her second book, currently underway, centers on a pioneering work of obstetrical illustration and the women whose remains it represents. She has published articles and essays on the materiality of plaster and pedagogies of the academy (Sculpture Journal), the technology of hanging (Journal 18), and the art of William Hogarth (Hogarth & Europe), among other topics. With Esther Chadwick and Cyra Levenson, she is also the co-curator of Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain, which opened at the Yale Center for British Art in 2014. 

Gamer’s work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the Kress Foundation, the Lewis Walpole Library, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the University of Glasgow Library. At Columbia, she teaches a range of courses, including Art Humanities, the Majors Colloquium, Nineteenth-Century Art in Europe, and Art History and the Archive. A committed mentor and advocate, she is the proud recipient of a 2018-2019 Faculty Mentoring Award from Columbia’s Arts and Sciences Graduate Council, and a member of the Junior Faculty Advisory Board (JFAB). 

City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London, forthcoming with Yale University Press 

“Britain, Empire, and Execution in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Journal18 (Fall 2021).

“The Smugglerius, re-viewed.” Sculpture Journal 28, no. 3 (2019). 

“Sexuality and Seduction.” In Hogarth & Europe, edited by Alice Insley and Martin Myrone, 172-175. London: Tate Britain, 2021.

“Scalpel to Burin: A Material History of William Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus.” In William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum, edited by Mungo Campbell and Nathan Flis, 108-125. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 

Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain (47pp), co-authored with Esther Chadwick and Cyra Levenson. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2014.

“Criminal and Martyr: The Case of James Legg’s Anatomical Crucifixion.” In Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice, edited by Sally Promey, 495-513. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

“George Morland’s Slave Trade and African Hospitality: Slavery, Sentiment and the Limits of the Abolitionist Image.” In The Slave in European Art, edited by Jean Michel Massing and Elizabeth McGrath, 297-319. London and Turin: Warburg Institute, 2012.