Dr Naomi Billingsley

Portrait of Naomi Billingsley, Research Development Manager
Position
Interim Head of Research Development
Specialism
collaborative research, eighteenth century British art, William Blake, correspondence studies, Christianity and art
Department
Collections
Related Offices
Member of AHRC Peer Review College

Naomi works with colleagues across the Library to develop research projects and collaborations with partners organisations.

She is the Research Development lead for the following areas in the Library:

  • Western Heritage Collections
  • Digital Scholarship
  • Research Infrastructure Services

Naomi is also Research Development lead for the Library's strategic partnership with the National Trust.

Naomi is currently acting as Interim Head of Research Development.

Before joining the British Library in 2020, Naomi was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester, where she was involved in a variety of research collaborations, including co-founding the Manchester Centre for Correspondence Studies. She previously held research roles at the Diocese of Chichester and King’s College London.

Naomi’s doctoral research focused on the figure of Christ in the art of William Blake, and she has since researched and published on topics including William Blake, twentieth century ecclesiastical art, and biblical painting and illustration in late eighteenth century Britain.

Publications

Book

The Visionary Art of William Blake: Christianity, Romanticism and the Pictorial Imagination (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018).

  Read a sample chapter via our Research Repository.

Digital edition

Bible Illustrations (Manchester Digital Collections, 2020).

Download the TEI metadata via our Research Repository:

Selected articles and chapters

'“The Great Bowyer Bible”: Robert Bowyer and the Macklin Bible', in Journal of Illustration 8.1 (2021), pp. 51–80.

'“As the Eye Is Formed”: Seeing as Christ in Blake’s Bartimaeus', in The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Elizabeth Ludlow (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 39–52.

‘Re-viewing William Blake’s Paradise Regained (c.1816–1820)’, in Religion and the Arts 22.1–2 (2018), pp. 16–39.

‘“On the Stocks”: Biblical watercolours from the Felpham Period’, in William Blake in Sussex: Visions of Albion, ed. Andrew Loukes (London: National Trust in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, 2018), pp. 33–45.

‘Citizens of “London” as Members of the Divine Body in William Blake’s biblical illustrations’, in Visualising a Sacred City: London, Art and Religion, ed. Ben Quash, Aaron Rosen and Chloë Reddaway (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), pp. 89–101.

 

View more publications by Naomi Billingsley in our Research Repository.

View Naomi Billingsley's list of publications on her ORCiD profile.