Dr Emma Barker

Professional biography

BA History (Cambridge), MA Art History, PhD Art History (Courtauld, London)

Emma Barker’s research focuses on French eighteenth-century art. She has also published and supervised research on art in eighteenth-century Britain.   

She joined the OU in September 1995, after having worked as a temporary lecturer at the universities of East Anglia, York, Warwick and Sussex.

Research interests

Dr Barker has published extensively on the work of the French eighteenth-century artist, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and on the wider phenomenon of sentimentalism in the art of this period, of which Greuze was a leading exponent. Her principal publication in this area is her book, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

She has also published essays on portraiture in eighteenth-century France and Britain, as well as on different aspects of French art of this period. Her research has appeared in such journals as the Art Bulletin, Art History, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Oxford Art Journal and Representations.

Her current research explores art and blindness in France between the ancien regime and the modern era. This project, which develops out of her interest in the role of vision and spectatorship in sentimentalism, examines images of the blind by both canonical and little-known artists across the full range of French visual culture. It seeks thereby to illuminate the ways in which blindness has historically been constructed in relation to the experience of sight and, moreover, provides a test case for assessing arguments about the changing significance of vision in French culture during the transition to modernity.

Dr Barker’s research has been supported by grants from the British Academy.

Teaching interests

Dr Barker has contributed module materials to over ten modules, including, most recently, A344 (Art and its Global Histories) and A236 (Art and Visual Cultures in the Modern World) The topics of the module materials that she has authored range from ‘Dutch seventeenth-century art in global perspective’ to ‘Art, politics and modernity'.

She was chair of the MA in Art History from 2004 to 2010. She is currently chair of A236 and deputy chair of A344. 

Prospective PhD students interested in conducting research into art and visual culture of the period from the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries should contact Dr Barker by email.

Impact and engagement

Dr Barker has given public lectures at various venues, including the Wallace Collection, the National Gallery, Chawton House Library and the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. 

She has also spoken at and co-organised study days at the National Gallery, London, including ‘Subversive Portraits: Goya and his Legacy’ (2015) and ‘Romantic Rebellions: Delacroix to Picasso’ (2016), as well as contributing to a study day at Tate Modern, 'Myths of the Artist' (2010). 

She contributed an essay to the catalogue of the exhibition, ‘Inspiration: Iconic Works’, held at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, and the Ateneum, Helsinki, in 2020.

She also contributed to an episode of ‘In Our Time’ on BBC Radio 4, on The Artist (2002)

In addition, she has made two films for Open Arts Objects, on Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus (National Gallery, London) and Jean-Baptiste Chardin's Lady Taking Tea (Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow). A series of four short films that she made on The Seasons in Art is available as a short OpenLearn course.