Rosie Dias is an art historian who specialises in eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British art and culture. She studied at the University of York, where she was later a Teaching Fellow, before taking up a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She came to Warwick in 2005, and teaches modules on eighteenth-century British art, on seventeenth-century Dutch painting, on the Grand Tour and on English perceptions of Venice. She is currently finishing a book manuscript on John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and constructions of Englishness in late eighteenth century history painting.

English Perceptions of Venice

Rosie’s next project, for which she has been awarded funding by the Reinvention Centre, focuses on the aesthetic responses made by British and American tourists, artists, architects, aesthetic theorists and film-makers to Venice from the seventeenth-century to the present day. The third-year special subject which she teaches encourages students to engage with a range of visual and textual material ranging from Grand Tourists’ diaries to Las Vegas casinos. The aim of this Fellowship is to enable students to think conceptually and synthetically across this generically and historically diverse range of objects. Seminars in the classroom will be complemented by opportunities to undertake primary research in museum and gallery archives and study rooms with the ultimate aim of each student curating an online exhibition.