Meredith Jane Gamer
Supported by the Friends of Glasgow University Library
Meredith Gamer is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York. Her work centers primarily on eighteenth-century Britain and the Atlantic world, with a focus on histories of punishment, slavery, and medicine. Meredith’s first book, City of the Gallows (Yale University Press, publication June 2026), reveals the complex and often unexpected connections between the work of art and the spectacle of capital punishment in eighteenth-century London. She is also the co-curator, with Esther Chadwick and Cyra Levenson, of the exhibition Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain, which opened at the Yale Center for British Art in October 2014.
Meredith’s new book project builds on work she began a decade ago as a contributor to the landmark exhibition and publication, William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum (Yale University Press, 2018). Titled Taken from Life: Hunter’s Anatomy and the Art of Reproduction, the project offers a new account of Hunter’s magnum opus, The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Exhibited in Figures (1774). A pioneering work of obstetrical illustration, Hunter’s Anatomy has been widely studied by historians of medicine and art alike. However, this scholarship has tended to focus on Hunter himself and the many other men who helped him produce it. By contrast, in Taken from Life, Meredith shifts attention to the women whose bodies the Anatomy represents, placing them at the center of the story she tells.
I am thrilled to have been awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Glasgow Library. The Library holds an extraordinary collection of materials relating to Hunter’s practice as an anatomist, teacher, and physician, as well as the full set of preparatory drawings made by Jan van Rymsdyck for the Anatomy’s plates. I look forward to studying these works and others, and to learning from the Library’s expert staff of librarians, archivists, and curators.
