Celina Fox facts for kids

Celina Fox, born on May 4, 1947, is a historian who loves studying the past of London. She focuses on the 1700s and 1800s. She used to be in charge of paintings, prints, and drawings at the Museum of London.

Celina Fox's Education and Studies

Celina Fox studied history at Newnham College, Cambridge. She finished her studies there in 1969. In the same year, she won a special Kennedy Scholarship. This allowed her to study at Harvard University for a while. She later earned her doctorate (a high-level degree) from University of Oxford in 1974. Her main research was about how newspapers and magazines used pictures in England during the 1830s and 1840s.

She also received other important scholarships and grants. For example, in 2005, she got support from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. This helped her research art related to industry in the United States and Sweden. In 2012, she was a scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. She also received a scholarship from the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale in the same year.

Celina Fox's Career in Museums

Celina Fox was one of the first curators for the Museum of London in the 1970s. A curator is someone who manages and organizes collections in a museum. In 1982, she helped create an exhibition about masquerade balls from the 1700s.

In 1987, she was the Keeper of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the museum. She wrote a big book called Londoners to go with an exhibition. This exhibition was special because it focused only on how people living in London were shown in art over many years. Around 1990, she became an assistant director at the museum.

In 1992, she helped organize a huge exhibition in Germany called London: World City, 1800-1842. This was the biggest British art exhibition ever shown in Germany. Celina Fox also helped with museum projects in Russia and Germany. She was part of a group that decided which projects would get money from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Honoring History with Blue Plaques

Celina Fox was the vice-chair for the Blue Plaques Panel of English Heritage. Blue plaques are special signs placed on buildings to honor famous people who lived or worked there. In 2013, she spoke out when the panel's budget was cut by half. She worried that this would make the blue plaque scheme less good.

She resigned from the panel in 2014, along with another member. They left because they felt the scheme was being taken apart and its past achievements were being ignored.

Awards and Recognition

Celina Fox has received several awards for her important work:

• 2011 – She won the Peter Neaverson Award for her book The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment.
• 2012 – She received the Historians of British Art (HBA) Book Award. This award recognized her excellent research on art from before 1800.

Other Contributions

In 1979, Celina Fox was a founding member of The Thirties Society. This group later became The Twentieth Century Society, which works to protect important buildings from the 20th century.

In 1999, she suggested that a statue of Nelson Mandela should be placed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. She said he was a very important person of the 20th century. She also thought the statue of George IV should be moved, as she felt he was not a very heroic figure.

Celina Fox also joined writer Simon Jenkins on some of his research trips. These trips helped him write his books England's Thousand Best Houses (2004) and England's Thousand Best Churches (2009). She is also on the editorial board of a magazine called Print Quarterly.