Adriana Turpin studied History at Oxford and then History of Art at the Courtauld Institute.

She was the Academic Director of two MA programs on the History and Business of Art and Collecting, run by the Institut d’Études Supèrieures des Arts in Paris, validated by the University of Warwick until 2017 and remains a consultant and teacher at IESA Arts&Culture.

As a furniture specialist, she teaches on English furniture and on collecting furniture and is the FHS Project Manager for the British and Irish Furniture Makers Online database.

She is a founder member of the Seminar on Display and Collecting at the Institute of Historical Research, and is the co-editor of their publications; she is also the Chairman of the Society for the History of Collecting.

Adriana is also on the Editorial board of the Brill publication series on art markets and collecting and the Journal of the History of Collections.

Adriana has written on a variety of topics related to collecting and to the history of furniture. Her most recent articles include:

  • ‘Walpole and the creation of a market in Britain for ebony furniture from the East’ in Researching Art Markets: Past, Present and Tools for the Future, eds. Elisabetta Lazzaro, Nathalie Moureaux and Adriana Turpin Routledge, 2021); 

  • ‘Collecting French Furniture in the Nineteenth Century: Appropriation as a Form of Nationalism?’ in Art Crossing Borders: The Internationalisation of the Art Market in the Age of Nation States, 1750-1914, eds. Jan Dirk Baetens and Dries Lyna (Brill, 2019);

  • 'The Value of a Collection: Collecting Practices in Early Modern Europe in Locating and Dislocating Value: A Pragmatic Approach to Early Modern and Nineteenth-Century Economic Practices, eds. Bert De Munck & Dries Lyna (Ashgate Press, 2014); 

  • ‘Objectifying the Domestic Interior: Domestic Furnishings and the Historical  Interpretation of the Italian Renaissance Interior, in The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior, 1400-1700, eds. Erin Campbell, Stephanie R. Miller,  Elizabeth Carroll Consavari (Ashgate, 2013);

  • ‘The Display of Exotica in the Tribuna’ in Collecting East and West, eds. Susan Bracken, Andrea Galdy and Adriana Turpin (Cambridge Scholar Press, 2012

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