James Baker

http://cradledincaricature.wordpress.com/

Postdoctoral Fellow, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (from September 2012).

Associate Lecturer, School of History, University of Kent.

Assistant Project Manager, City and Region, 1400-1914 (Phase II: Rochester Bridge Trust (RBT) Estates) http://www.cityandregion.org/

Project Manager, Cradled in Caricature: a multidisciplinary event, 27 April 2012 (http://twitter.com/cincaricature)

Phd Cartoons and Caricature completed September 2010, viva December 2010 http://kar.kent.ac.uk/28624/

I have recently completed a doctoral study concered with graphic satire/satirical prints as modes of communication within broader networks of visual culture, with particular focus on the notions of (customary) liberty present in the work of the graphic artist Isaac Cruikshank between 1783 and 1811. My thesis offers a revisionist approach to assumptions regarding the popularity of satirical prints and their status as dominated by high/international politics. Isaac's prints, more representative of this diverse trade than his leading contemporary James Gillray, offer an opportunity to see the ideological content of graphic satire in this period as driven, to a large extent, by an artist/consumer/publisher nexus - in short I argue that publishers, in order to succeed, aimed the content of their publications at the mentalities of those metropolitan consumer groups with sufficient financial means to offset the not inconsiderable capital investment involved in print engraving/reproduction. This in turn meant that the majority of graphic satires were not the product of cogent streams of individual artistic/satiric/moral consciousness, but mediated ideologically by the need for satirical prints to sell in a competitive metropolitan marketplace. This contention, constructed through a close study of print production techniques, print pricing, urban geography and Isaac's journeyman/'cottage industry' working patterns, is supported by the satires he produced, primarily I argue on social topics (a group broadened by reviewing the polarised categorisations of prints between 'political' and 'social' offered by Dorothy George and since unquestioned by scholars) with case studies on gender (fashion; courting; marriage), scandal (Mary Anne Clarke; OP War) and Otherness (John Philip Kemble; Fops; Scots; Irish). The latter case study problematises the work of Linda Colley with respect to Otherness, giving close attention to internal Others over and above her strictly external bugaboos.
This study hopes to augment and challenge existing scholarship of late-Georgian Britain by offering a new model through which to understand the workings of visual culture in this period, and an assertion of the preoccupation of (metropolitan) Britons with domestic constructions of liberty during this period of international conflict.

My post-doctoral interests include:
- the processes of production and business environments surrounding satirical prints.
- diachronic themes with respect to the construction and communication of humour in graphic discourses between the seventeenth and late-nineteenth centuries.
- the Covent Garden old price riots of September 1809 to January 1810.
- the utility (or otherwise) of neuroscientific debates to humanities research.