Ashley Boulden

PhD Candidate


Ashley is a sixth-year doctoral candidate studying eighteenth-century French prints and drawings. She received her B.A. with honors in Art History and French from Wellesley College in 2009, where her senior thesis “A Converging of Styles: The Davis Museum’s Album of 138 Ornament Prints” won the Plogsterth Prize in Art History. She completed an M.St. in History of Art at the University of Oxford in 2011. Under the direction of Dr. Sarah Betzer, her dissertation “Licentious Prints: The Persistence of the Rocaille and the Malleable Antique in French Ornament Prints and Interiors, 1736-1788” examines the circulation of engraved ornament in eighteenth-century Paris and its relationship to residential interior space and architectural theory. 

Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, she held positions in several museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, and the Musée du Louvre, where she was the Liliane Pingoud Soriano Curatorial Fellow. As an exhibition assistant at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she supported the major traveling loan exhibitions Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis (Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museo Correr, Venice, 2013-2014), whose catalogue was awarded the 2014 Dedalus Foundation prize, and Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting (Musée du Luxembourg, Paris; National Gallery of Art, London; and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2014-2015).

Her work is generously supported by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, where she has been an Edgar Shannon Fellow since 2015. Her research has also been supported by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Kapp Family, the Rare Book School, and the Decorative Arts Trust. In 2018, she was the inaugural Stacy Lloyd III Fellow for Bibliographic Study at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. As a Ruffin Graduate Curatorial Fellow, she co-curated the student exhibition Impression. Reflection. Translation. (Ruffin Gallery, UVa, 2019). Most recently, she conducted dissertation research in Paris during the 2019-2020 academic year with the support of an École normale supérieure (ENS) Fellowship and a Chateaubriand Fellowship.