About the Organisers
Jin Chenxiao
Year started: 2024
Research area: British Japonisme and cross-cultural art in the nineteenth century
Jin Chenxiao (she/her) researches the representation of Meiji Japan in British visual and material culture from the 1880s to the 1910s. Focusing on the works of Mortimer Menpes, she is particularly interested in the intermedial relationship between paintings, photographs and reprographics. She also has a broader interest in the intersection of the histories of British and Japanese modern art. Jin enjoys collecting antique books and ephemera related to her research interests.
Alex Lednicky
Year started: 2025
Research area: queer museology and contemporary art exhibitions since 2015
Alex Lednicky’s (she/they) research examines how museums and galleries in the US and UK are collecting, curating, displaying, and interpreting queer art and artists. Although the bulk of this research is focused specifically on queer exhibitions, it also investigates how non-queer exhibitions create explicitly queer sections within the exhibition.
Alex McLachlan Bourke
Year started: 2025
Research area: Victorian and Edwardian painting, classical reception, feminist art history
Alex McLachlan Bourke (she/her) researches the classical reception of late Victorian and early Edwardian painting with a particular interest in the works of women artists and gendered interpretation of Greek and Roman myth. Her dissertation is a monograph of artist Henrietta Rae. She holds an MLitt in Museum and Heritage Studies from the University of St. Andrews and a BA in Politics and Human Rights from the University of Essex.
Francesco Alessandrini Lupia
Year started: 2025
Research area: Emulation of Bolognese seventeenth-century art
Francesco Alessandrini Lupia (he/him) is a PhD student at the Universities of St Andrews and Bonn (cotutelle). He studies the emulation of Bolognese seventeenth-century compositions across different media and geographies, thereby questioning long-established hierarchies between “original” and “copy”. Before starting his PhD, Francesco completed his undergraduate studies in Art History at the University of St Andrews and the MA in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture at the Warburg Institute in London.
Kateryna Volochniuk
Year started: 2023
Research area: Soviet Ukrainian photojournalism and family archives
Kateryna Volochniuk (she/her) is a Ukraine-born, Scotland-based historian of photography and researcher; she is a SGSAH-funded PhD Сandidate at the University of St Andrews and a Researcher in the IWM funded Occupational Formations: Infrastructures of the Seen and Unseen working group. Kateryna’s scholarly pursuits focus on the intersection of the history of photography, memory studies and visual culture. Her ongoing research project delves into the personal archive of her grandfather Oleksii Shepeliuk. The archive has never been studied and will provide critical insights into Ukrainian Soviet-era industrial history and heritage, which exists today in a grey zone between abandonment and extinction.
Rebecca Mesonjnik
Year started: 2024
Research area: Participatory Methods in Ukrainian Museums
Rebecca (She/They) is a PhD candidate and Fulbright Postgraduate award recipient at the University of St Andrews, working within the Institute for Museums, Heritage and Society. Their dissertation, Power and Participation in the Museum Context: How Ukrainian Museums Utilize Participatory Methods in Public Engagement Programs, examines how Ukrainian museums employ participation to construct and communicate national identity.
Specifically, this project investigates how participatory methods are used by museum employees to facilitate public engagement programs in the wake of the full-scale invasion, and considers the modality through which these activities may challenge or support traditional hierarchies of power present in the museum context.