Frances Varley

Project Overview

Maps do more than represent space – they can reveal bias, uncover misinformation, and indicate networks and changes. Varley's Fellowship will produce an interactive and publicly-available map of the trade card collection in the John Evan Bedford Library of Furniture History in order to explore the analytical potential of visualising the collection across space and time. By intersecting the art historical study of individual objects alongside network analysis of the entire collection, her project considers the methodological intersection of digital and analogue art historical methods.  

The trade card collection spans locations from Leeds to Osaka, documenting design and manufacturing history from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Individual cards reveal information about traders, locations, and techniques, while their accumulating reflects Bedford’s collecting priorities. Varley's project contends that digital mapping can help to expose distortions, uncover connections, and re-present the wealth of information available in the collection.

The project's primary output is an interactive public map, developed and hosted using ArcGIS StoryMaps, and incorporating IIIF functionality for detailed object examination. The project's second output will be a peer-reviewed article for the Journal of the History of Collections.

You can read a post about the project on the Cultural Collections blog.

Profile

Alongside the Fellowship, Varley is beginning work on a monograph project that traces the transatlantic and imperial genealogies of representations of ‘masculinity’ and the male body in the art of the late-nineteenth century United States. Through comparative visual analysis, archival research, and network mapping, it demonstrates how British imperial masculinities were transmitted to the United States, and how they were contested, dynamic, and unstable. 

Varley has previously been an Associate Lecturer/Teaching Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art, where she taught the art histories of the nineteenth-century United States, Britain, and Europe, and a Research Fellow at Leeds University Library. Her research interrogated the ethics, efficacy, and application of Generative AI to studies of university cultural collections.  

Varley was awarded her PhD in History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2024. She completed her MA at The Courtauld in 2019 and received her undergraduate degree in History in 2017 from Somerville College, University of Oxford. 

Publications

Journal Article

Varley, F., ‘Cuba to Castlefield: Cosmopolitanism, Architecture, and Philanthropy in the John Rylands Library’ Journal of Victorian Culture (Forthcoming) 

Web Publications

Varley F., ‘Edward Burne-Jones: flesh and fantasy in Victorian art’  Art UK  https://artuk.org/discover/stories/edward-burne-jones-flesh-and-fantasy-in-victorian-art (16 September 2025) 

Varley, F., ‘Generative AI as Research Collaborator: The Bedford Trade Card Collection ’ Leeds University Library Blog https://leedsunilibrary.wordpress.com/2025/07/24/generative-ai-as-research-collaborator-the-bedford-trade-card-collection-part-1/ (24 July 2025) 

Conferences and Presentations

‘Monet: London, Paris, and Beyond’ – The Courtauld (2024) 

‘William H. Dorsey’s Philadelphia Collection: Archive, Activism, Art’ – Association for Art History, University of Bristol (2024) 

‘Making Meaning in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel at the Manchester Art Museum’ – Tate Britain, University of York, and the Paul Mellon Centre (2023) 

‘Winslow Homer: An American in Paris’ – National Gallery (2022) 

‘“Not of the Ordinary Type”: Thomas Horsfall and the Manchester Art Museum’ – The Frick Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Yale University (2022)