Rebecca Whiteley is currently researching her PhD in the History of Art Department, University College London. Her thesis focuses on early modern print images of the pregnant body and the unborn child. Her research investigates how such images both influenced and reflected the way that the body was understood, visualised and treated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her wider interests include histories of print and the book, histories of the body and medicine, and social histories of art.

Before beginning the PhD, Rebecca studied for her BA in English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford, and her MA in History of Art at UCL. She has also worked at the UCL Art Museum as a curatorial assistant and at the Royal Collection at Windsor as a curatorial intern. She also teaches a museum-based undergraduate course on images and the production of knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at UCL. She recently undertook a 3-month research fellowship at the Huntington Library, Los Angeles.