Susan Jenkins
Visiting Research Fellow
Collaborations and Dialogues: links between the collections at Westminster Abbey and the V&A
I am currently working on a project to prepare a sculpture catalogue of 100 monuments at Westminster Abbey with reference to the designs, models and drawings in the V&A: offering contextualisation for the Abbey’s monuments and contributing new information to the V&A’s Explore the Collection records.
I have been Curator of Westminster Abbey since 2014, where I was responsible for planning the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries: new permanent display galleries which opened in June 2018. I began my career in the V&A’s former department of Prints, Drawings and Paintings, was formerly curator at Historic Royal Palaces (assisting with the presentation of the Tudor Kitchens and the State Apartments); Senior Curator at English Heritage (including Apsley House and Kenwood) and Director of Art at Compton Verney. I have held an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art and a research internship at the J.Paul Getty Museum and have published widely.
Selected publications
Curry, A. and Jenkins, S. (eds), The Funeral Achievements of Henry V at Westminster Abbey, Royal Armouries Research Series Volume II, Boydell Press, 2022
The Queen’s Window by David Hockney, Westminster Abbey, Scala 2020
‘John Flaxman’s funerary monument for the 1st Earl of Mansfield in Westminster Abbey’, The Burlington Magazine, 162, no. 1405, April 2020, pp. 276–87
‘‘Sunbeams and shadows’: exhibiting the collection at Westminster Abbey’ The Burlington Magazine, 161, no. 1390, January 2019, pp. 4–8
Jenkins, S. and Blessley, K., ‘Royal wooden funeral effigies at Westminster Abbey’, The Burlington Magazine, 61, no. 1390, January 2019, pp. 26–35
Jenkins, S. and Trowles, T., The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries: Westminster Abbey, Scala, 2018