Amelia's research asks: What if we treated trees as equally important to human figures in painting? She hopes to uncover new ecological, social, and artistic meaning by considering trees as generative actors in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting. Her dissertation “Trees as Bodies of Communication: The Arboreal Aesthetic in French Painting, 1780-1870” draws on artistic theory, environmental history, and scientific knowledge to investigate how tree and human bodies create critical narratives. Having completed an MA in modern and contemporary art, she also puts eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art in conversation with contemporary painting. 

Amelia is a 2025-2026 Residential Fellow at the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology. At the University of Iowa, she was a Humanities for the Public Good summer fellow and co-curated the exhibition Alternate Paths: New Object Histories from Africa to America at the Stanley Museum of Art. Her research has been supported by Historians of Eighteenth Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) and the University of Iowa Graduate College. Recently, she gave the paper “Gendered Difference and the Tree-Human Body in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Art” at the conference VariAbilities (University of Winchester) in New York. 

You can read about Amelia's research on her Substack.