Zoe Copeman awarded two-year Kress Fellowship to research in London

Zoe to continue her ground-breaking research on the history of surgical imagery and texts related to the performance of mastectomies in Europe in the early modern period

Zoe Copeman has been awarded a Kress History of Art Institutional Fellowship, jointly administered by the Warburg Institute and Courtauld Institute of Art, for a two-year appointment that will commence September 2024. This pre-doctoral fellowship will support research for her dissertation entitled “Cankerous Femme: The European Mastectomy and the Semiotics of Surgery.” Over the past four years, Zoe has systematically studied early modern surgical tracts to investigate how surgeons used imagery to encourage study, promote invention, and advertise their field. Using the mastectomy as a case study, her research evaluates the discrete units that compose this semiotics of surgery to argue that the fragmented view surgeons adopted to promote and advance their field also contributed to the re-defining of pathological diseases and social norms within eighteenth-century Great Britain.

Congratulations Zoe!