About
Genevra (Nessa) Higginson is a doctoral candidate studying early modern European print culture, with particular attention to materiality, genre, and ecological networks. Her dissertation uncovers material and semiotic resonances between the print technology of etching and the practice of botany during the long seventeenth century. A set of 319 etchings made for the French Royal Academy of Science's plant treatise, L'Histoire des Plantes (commissioned 1667), serves as the primary site of investigation, demonstrating how state investment in printmaking and plant research worked as mutually constitutive pillars for epistemic and material dominion.
Genevra is the 2026-27 Getty Museum Graduate Intern in the Drawings Department. In 2024, she served as the Michael Bromberg Fellow for Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, where she assisted with the exhibition "Picasso: printmaker" and conducted independent research on botanical prints from the Sloane collection. Prior to her doctoral studies, Genevra worked in museums. She was the Curatorial Assistant for Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, where she co-curated the exhibition "Off the Walls: Gifts from Professor John A. Robertson," contributed to the exhibition "After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints," and managed the Print Study Room. Genevra also worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as the Department Coordinator for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.
