Aimee Blackledge
HISTORICAL FICTION CONSULTANT, AUTHOR & ART HISTORIAN
I'm an art historian with a DPhil from the University of Oxford, a historical fiction writer, and a specialist consultant in the material and sensory world of Early Modern Europe.
My doctoral research examined how objects, collections, and visual culture shaped identity in Early Modern England—‘Materials for the Artist's Mind: Artists as Collectors in Eighteenth-Century England’. I have taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Liverpool, and on the Williams-Exeter Programme and have worked as a research associate, curator, and post-doctoral researcher across the history of art. My curatorial and research projects have included collaborations with the BBC and Art UK.
My specialism is the world your characters inhabit: the objects they touch, the clothes they wear, the rooms they move through, the hierarchies they navigate.
‘Historical accuracy is not background detail—it’s the texture that makes a historical world feel real rather than reconstructed.’
What sets me apart from a pure academic consultant is that I'm also a writer navigating the same challenges. My debut historical novel, Clouded in Clerkenwell, is set in tumultuous 17th-century London, and I'm currently at work on my second novel, following the later life of Hester Tradescant in South Lambeth. I understand the gap between the archive and the page because I cross this divide myself every day.
Born in Michigan and based in the UK for over 25 years, I'm also a practising abstract painter whose work has been exhibited and sold in commercial galleries across the UK. My poetry pamphlet Ghost Bones, written under the mentorship of T.S. Eliot Prize winner Joelle Taylor, was described by her as 'inventive, exploratory, and necessary’.
If you're working in the early modern period (1500-1800) and want to make sure your historical world feels real to the readers who matter most, I'd love to hear from you.
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