Susannah Lyon-Whaley

Profile

Biography

Susannah was appointed Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow (UKRI-guaranteed) at the University of York in July 2024. She completed a Masters in English Literature and a PhD in Art History at Waipapa Taumata Rau The University of Auckland in 2019 and 2023 respectively, supported in the latter by a University Doctoral Scholarship. While completing her PhD, she was also employed as a Professional Teaching Fellow at Waipapa Taumata Rau The University of Auckland.

Susannah’s research interests include women’s relationship with nature as expressed across the interdisciplinary boundaries of art, literature, and material culture, especially in global and colonial contexts.

Research

Overview

Susannah’s current research project is titled ‘Observing, Consuming, Engaging, Appropriating Nature (OCEAN): Queens Consorts and Ecologies of Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Britain. Supervised primarily by Lauren Working (Department of English and Related Literatures) with a secondary supervision by Cordula Van Wyhe (History of Art), the project uses four focus objects and books owned by queens as touchstones for developing new perspectives on how elite Stuart women used and understood nature from across the sea within the political world of the British court. Susannah will examine queens’ cabinets, miniatures, chapel ornaments and porcelain, featuring materials such as ebony, flowers, pearls, silver, tusk, clay and botanics from the Americas, Japan, Europe, and the Ottoman Empire. She reads these alongside the queens’ books and masques, to reconstruct their own knowledge about materials and encounter, vital to their integration into consorts’ experiences and concepts of global change and power.

Susannah has written articles on 20th-century Aotearoa New Zealand poets Robin Hyde and Mary Stanley, and artist Rita Angus, examining the goddess as a proto-feminist model in their work. Her doctoral research on Catherine of Braganza (1638-1705) considered the development of the queen consort’s iconography and patronage as part of the culture of nature at the late Stuart court. Her publications on Stuart queens include their visits to the spas from a cultural and medical standpoint, and their artistic patronage. She is the editor of the interdisciplinary volume Floral Culture and the Tudor and Stuart Courts (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).

External activities

Overview

Susannah is a host for The Royal Studies Podcast based at the University of Winchester. She is also a co-organiser of the Women and Flowers Research Network which runs regular reading groups.