BA, MA (Victoria), MA, PhD (Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)

Contact details

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House

Strand

London WC2R 0RN

 

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7848 2983

christine.stevenson@courtauld.ac.uk

 

Christine Stevenson

Christine Stevenson began teaching at the Institute in 2002, after ten years as a lecturer at the University of Reading, and, previously, work as an academic editor at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, and the Grove Dictionary of Art. She is the author of the standard work on British hospitals and asylums in the Early Modern period, and has published numerous articles and review essays about this and other subjects, including Danish architecture and industrial design.

She sits on the Advisory Council for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and has recently appeared in the TV drama-documentary Bedlam: the history of Bethlem Hospital and contributed to the hospital’s own history website.

 

research interests


  • The City of London in the reign of Charles II
  • Craftsman and architect
  • Architecture and memory
  • Topographical prints
  • Corporate and charitable patronage
  • Architectural destruction
  • Buildings and the body 
  • Festival and ephemeral architecture
  • Medicine and architecture

Titles of PhD theses supervised currently


  • Remaking the country house: country-house guidebooks in the late eighteenth century
  • ‘Tapers to candles’: Stuart ambassadors in English garden history
  • ‘To have and to hold’: architectural defence and destruction in England’s colonies, 1600–1713
  • ‘London's livery company halls in the seventeenth century’

 

Courses taught in 2012-13

 

 

Recent events


23 January 2013 ‘Architectural husbandry: “rough materials” and tough clients in eighteenth-century Britain’ (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Research Seminar, London)

23 February 2012 '"My craz'd Arches": seventeenth-century St Paul's assaulted, and protesting' ('Spaces of Dissent', workshop, Birbeck College, London)


18 November 2011 'Vantage points in the seventeenth-century City'. Conference, 'Landscape and "the arts of prospect" in early modern Britain', Paul Mellon Centre, London


6-8 July 2011 Keynote speaker, conference, 'Economy', Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff


23 May 2011 'The Destruction of Cheap Cross, London (1643)'. Conference, 'The Politics of Architectural Destruction', National University of Ireland, Maynooth

20 May 2011 ‘Court, City, Cosmos: Mediations of London's Second Royal Exchange'. Conference, 'British Art 1660-1735: Close Readings' at Tate Britain, London


21 February 2011 ‘Monuments and Forgetting' at the Royal Academy, London
Listen to a recording of this event


Recent publications

 

 


Forthcoming: The City and the King: Architecture and Politics in Restoration London (Yale University Press, 2013)



cover of Architecture and Interpretation: Essays for Eric Fernie
Architecture and Interpretation: Essays for Eric Fernie, edited with T. A. Heslop and Jill A. Franklin (Boydell & Brewer, 2012)

‘Vantage points in the seventeenth-century City’, London Journal 33 (2008): 217–32

 ‘Past Perfect’ (essay review of Fabricating the antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800 and James “Athenian” Stuart: the rediscovery of antiquity), Oxford Art Journal 31 (2008), 157–61

(essay review of Inigo Jones and the European classicist tradition and Inigo Jones and the classical tradition), Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67 (2008), 136–39

‘Prints “proper to shew to Gentlemen”: representing the British hospital, c.1700–1750’, pp. 195–218 in The impact of hospitals, 300–2000, ed. John Henderson, Peregrine Horden and Alessandro Pastore, Oxford and Bern, Peter Lang, 2007

‘From palace to hut: the architecture of military and naval medicine’, pp. 229–53 in British military and naval medicine, 1600-1830, ed. Geoffrey L. Hudson, Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine, Amsterdam and Atlanta, Rodopi, 2007
View proof copy



‘Occasional architecture in seventeenth-century London’, Architectural History 49 (2006): 35–74


‘Antimasque, pageant: Restoration and Bethlem at Moorfields’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 47 (Spring 2005): 19–37


‘Robert Hooke, Monuments, and Memory’, Art History 28 (2005): 43–73
View proof copy


‘Carsten Anker dines with the younger George Dance, and visits St Luke’s Hospital for the Insane’, Architectural History (2001), 153–61

Buildings and the body’, pp. 126–28 in The Oxford companion to the body, ed. Colin Blakemore and others, Oxford, Oxford University Press and The Physiological Society, 2001

cover of Medicine and magnificence: British hospital and asylum architecture, 1660–1815‘Medicine and architecture’, pp. 63–64 in The Oxford illustrated companion to medicine, ed. Stephen Lock and others, Oxford University Press, 2001


Medicine and magnificence: British hospital and asylum architecture, 1660–1815 (Yale University Press, 2000)

‘Hogarth’s mad king and his audiences’, History Workshop Journal (Spring 2000), 24–43


 

Keywords


Restoration; architecture; hospitals; asylums; Bedlam; monuments; topographical prints; English Baroque; City of London