Evelyn Welch


Evelyn Kathleen Welch is an American-English scholar of the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, and professor of Renaissance Studies, Provost, and Senior Vice President at King’s College London.

Career

Welch was born Evelyn Kathleen Samuels in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Ellen Richards and John S. Samuels III. Her younger brother is actor John Stockwell. She was educated and raised in the United States, before moving to the United Kingdom in 1981. A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard University and of the Warburg Institute, University of London, she has held a professorship as well as the office of Provost for Arts & Sciences at King's College London since October 2016, having previously served as Vice-Principal for Arts & Sciences from 2013. Previously, she had been Vice-Principal at Queen Mary University of London, and Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Sussex. She was a member of the Victoria and Albert Museum Board of Trustees from 2012 to 2016, the British Library Advisory Board and is the chair of Trustees of the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Advisory Board of the Warburg Institute. She specialises in art of the Italian Renaissance, as well as material culture, on which she has published extensively. Her books include Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600, a winner of the 2005 Wolfson History Prize. Her current work is on fashion in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe which was funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area. In 2016 she became a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator award holder for her work on 'Renaissance Skin'.

Personal life

Welch was formerly married to Nicholas Russell "Nick" Welch, a British advertising executive: they divorced around 1999. She is the mother of singer and songwriter Florence Welch, frontwoman of the English rock band Florence and the Machine, and has two other children and three step-children. She is married to Professor Peter Openshaw, an immunologist and professor of Experimental Medicine at Imperial College, London.

Selected works