Emma Merkling is an art historian based at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Durham University, specialising in the intersections between art, science, and spiritualism in the long nineteenth century.

She is co-host of Drawing Blood, a podcast about visual culture, the history of science and medicine, and the macabre. Emma received her PhD from the Courtauld in 2021 for a thesis on spiritualist artist Evelyn De Morgan and science, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Courtauld’s Centre for American Art, University of Stirling, and the Science Museum (London).

She has just completed a grant project on the scientific photographs of the medium 'Margery' Crandon, and is currently working on a book project, with Dr Thomas Hughes, on The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Ecology, Matter, Form, where her contribution focuses on queer/more-than-human desire, ecology, and horror in the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron.
www.emmamerkling.com
https://drawingbloodpod.wordpress.com