The Courtauld has a teaching staff of approximately 30, including six conservation teachers, who cover a very broad spectrum of the arts and architecture of the Western world from classical antiquity to the present day.
We received the highest rating in the recent Quality Assurance Agency Audit, and in the most recent Research Assessment Exercise in 2001, The Courtauld was the only history of art department in the country to be awarded a 5-star distinction.
History of Art
Twentieth century dress, in particular fashion, modernity and the body. Interests also include the development of American sportswear and fashion since the 1920s, and ready-to-wear and its relationship to haute couture.
Art, technology, medical science and images of the body in the later Victorian period. Also interested in early Victorian topography, urban scenes and images of modern life.
Interests revolve around cultural identity, politics and gender studies. Current research focuses on an in-depth study of Women in Expressionist Culture: Artists, Patrons and Dealers. She has a deep interest in the notion of Holocaust culture and art in exile in Great Britain.
Twentieth-century and contemporary art and photography, with special reference to museums and curating, and the history and current practice of temporary exhibitions and display.
Western European art of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Special interest in the art and architecture associated with the Mendicant Orders in the century following their foundation, with particular reference to Central Italy.
Renaissance and Baroque Architecture. Current research focuses on Bologna, architecture and fifteenth-century texts, Italian Renaissance palaces, the Renaissance and Antiquity, and Rome.
The arts of Byzantium, the Caucasus and the Near East, and the interaction between Christian and Muslim communities in these regions.
Colour and language in Renaissance Venice; Titian and the body; veils and drapery in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern periods.
Medieval and Byzantine art of all sorts, but manuscript illumination in particular. Issues of production and consumption especially with regard to the communication and construction of meaning.
Particular interests are the Arts in southern Europe, 1550-1700, with special reference to the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, and the relations between Italy and France in the early modern period.
Art in relation to opportunities, particularly twentieth century Russian art, its reception inside and outside Russia, and extended case studies (including a new exhibition display of Lissitzky's work at Eindhoven). He has a forthcoming book on Rodchenko.
Northern European art of the fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries, especially panel painting, sculpture and manuscript illumination.
The art of the 1960s to the present, critical theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and the issue of gender.
Currently working on embodiment and sculpture in the early modern period, and on shifting notions of agency and the work of art from 1760 to 1950.
Particular interest is in European Modernism, 1850-1950, with special reference to art in France and especially Surrealism and science in the twenties and thirties, and the work and legacy of Marcel Duchamp. His more recent work has been a linguistics-inflected examination of art history as a kind of writing.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French art and architecture with special reference to decoration.
British art c.1660-1837, currently with special reference to genre painting.
Contemporary art (particularly issues of globalisation and political radicalism), twentieth-century British art, history of photography, online art.
Seventeenth to nineteenth-century British architecture. Special interests include the relationship between the City of London and the royal court after 1660; and corporate patronage, the topographical print, and the ‘public’ building in eighteenth-century Britain.
British art c1880-1980, the London art world in the 1960s, art education, feminism and gender issues.
Various aspects of twentieth-century art, including Dada and Surrealism, the School of Paris, art and politics in Europe and the Soviet block after 1945; international contemporary art, including performance.
Portraiture and issues of realism; the relationship between realism and desire, especially the significance of love in Dutch and Flemish visual culture, concepts of the artist in the early modern period. Joanna is interested in the creative and educational potential of collaboration.Joanna Woodall is responsible for the website Picturing the Netherlandish Canon, an online project focused on a crucial early modern text on Netherlandish art and culture: Hendrick Hondius the Elder’s print series of artists, Pictorum aliquot celebrium, præcipué Germaniæ Inferioris, effigies (The Hague 1610).
Conservation
Materials and techniques of paintings and the investigation of conservation-related problems.
Conservation and original techniques of wall paintings, in particular diagnosis of environmental causes of deterioration.
Conservation, original techniques, and art historical aspects of wall paintings, especially of the Medieval period.
Mechanical and optical deterioration of canvas paintings, structural conservation treatments, and the use of non-contact techniques for the measurement of the full-fieldstrains induced in paintings by their structural and environmental parameters.