Research Forum
News & Reports Archive
appointments
Research Forum Visiting Professors
2010-11
The Research Forum is pleased to announce that Professors T.J. Clark, Boris Groys, Richard Meyer, Anne Wagner and Ursula Weekes have been appointed Research Forum Visiting Professors for the Academic Year 2010-11.
Visiting Professorships are offered to scholars whose work plays a defining role in the discipline of art history and who are willing to share their research with the Courtauld community formally (through lectures and seminars) and informally for a period of one to five weeks.
Anne Wagner is Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She studied at Yale University and Brown University and has a PhD from Harvard University. Prior to her current role at Berkeley she was Associate Professor there from 1988 to 1991, and Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. She has lectured widely around the world and is the author of several books including: Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture; Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire; and Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe. She has also contributed to many exhibition catalogues and journals, including ArtForum, Sculpture Journal and October. Professor Wagner will be at the Courtauld in February 2011
T.J. Clark, one of the world’s leading authorities on the history French art of the nineteenth century and modernism, is Professor Emeritus of Modern Art t the University of California, Berkeley and holds a PhD from The Courtauld Insitute of Art. His books include The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-51, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, and more recently, The Sight of Death: An experiment in Art Writing (2006). Professor Clark will be at the Courtauld in May 2011.
Ursula Weekes was formerly Supervisor of the Print Room at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. She gained her PhD in 2002 from the Courtauld Institute of Art (published as 'Early Engravers and their Public' by Brepols/Harvey Miller, 2004). From 2004 to 2010 she was based in Delhi as a Postdoctoral Commonwealth Fellow at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, and she also taught on Mughal and Renaissance art for the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is now in London, completing her book on 'The Great Mughals and the Art of Europe'.
Research Forum / Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor
2010-11
Boris Groys (Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany) is the Research Forum/Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor for the academic year 2010-11. He will be teaching, in collaboration with Dr Sarah Wilson, the MA Global Conceptualism: The Last Avant-Garde or a New Beginning? This MA course seeks to redefine Conceptual art as the last coherent international avant-garde movement, and as a starting point for different contemporary artistic practices. Click here for additional information on the Research Forum/Andrew W. Mellon MA
TERRA FOUNDATION for american art FELLOWSHIPS AND VISITING PROFESSORSHIPS
With sponsorship from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Research Forum is pleased to announce a new two-year fellowship for the teaching and study of historical American art (pre-1980), as well two short-term visiting professorships in American art. These fellowships are part of an initiative of the Terra Foundation that aims to internationalise the field of historical American art, building a network of scholarly peers and has been awarded in conjunction with similar fellowships at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris. The two-year fellowship will enable an emerging scholar to teach on a selected American art topic at the Courtauld Institute and to undertake a major research project intended for publication. The visiting professorships are designed for scholars of American Art whose work plays a defining role in the disciplines of art and architectural history and conservation and who are willing to share their research with the Courtauld community formally (through lectures and seminars) and informally. In addition to presenting their research, the Visiting Professors are expected to meet with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to discuss their individual projects.
TERRA FOUNDATION for american art FELLOW
2012-13
William McManus completed her PhD at Princeton University in 2012, where his dissertation focused on the art and films of Andy Warhol in the social and psychoanalytic context of contemporary neoliberal aesthetics.
2009-11
Wendy Ikemoto completed her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2009. Her dissertation examined paired, or pendant, painting in the antebellum United States. She is currently working on the book manuscript of her dissertation and developing a study of American art in the Pacific world in the 19th and early-20th centuries. Her article Putting the ‘Rip’ in ‘Rip Van Winkle’: Historical Absence in John Quidor’s Pendant Paintings, was published in the summer 2009 issue of American Art.
TERRA FOUNDATION for american art VISITING PROFESSOR
2012-13
Christopher Reed is Professor of English and Visual Culture at Pennsylvania State University. His interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on issues of identity as they play out in visual culture, including fine art, design, and the mass media. Reed's influential anthology Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture was published in 1996. Also in 1996, he published, A Roger Fry Reader, which presented little known texts by this influential of art critic, widening his legacy beyond his reputation as the father for formalism. Reed’s 2004 Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity explored the relationship of the Bloomsbury group to ideas about the look of modern life. This was followed by a major traveling exhibition co-organized with Nancy Green in 2008, A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections. Recent publications include Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (Oxford 2011) and If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (Minnesota 2012), co-authored with Christopher Castiglia. In 2010 he published The Chrysanthème Papers: The Pink Notebook of Madame Chrysanthème and other Documents of French Japonisme. Reed’s current research, which forms the basis of his teaching at The Courtauld in autumn 2012, investigates how Japanese aesthetics were marshaled to define alternative forms of masculinity in modern America.
2010-11
Richard Meyer (Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Director the Contemporary Project at the
University of Southern California) has been appointed as Terra Foundation Visiting Professor for the Academic Year 2010-11.
Research Forum/Andrew W Mellon Foundation MA Postdoctoral Fellowship
2010-11
Anthony Gardner was awarded the Research Forum/Andrew W Mellon Foundation MA Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2010-11. He taught with Professor Sarah Wilson and Visiting Professor Boris Groys on the Research Forum/Mellon Foundation M.A. course, Global Conceptualism: The Last Avant-Garde or a New Beginning? Anthony Gardner received his doctorate from the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, in 2009, with a thesis entitled Politically Unbecoming: Critiques of “Democracy” and Postsocialist Art from Europe.
2009-10
Stephanie Schwartz was appointed Research Forum Mellon MA Postdoctoral Fellow for the Academic Year 2009-10. Stephanie Schwartz was previously the Andrew W Mellon Fellow at Bryn Mawr. She completed her doctoral dissertation, The Crime of Cuba: Urbanism, Photography and the Geopolitics of Americanization, at Columbia University in 2007. The title of her research project is Cuba per diem: Walker Evans and American Photography.
Charlie Miller was appointed Research Forum Mellon MA Postdoctoral Fellow for the Academic Year 2008-09
Research Forum Travel Scholarships
association of art historians fellowships
2007
The Research Forum awarded travel scholarships to six postgraduate students giving research papers at the 2007 AAH Annual Conference, in Belfast. The recipients of the travel awards were Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen, Laura Cleaver, Pat Hardy, Antigoni Memou, Rachel Wells and Hannah Williams. The six students presented their papers at the Courtauld on Friday 16th March 2007. View the timetable and abstracts of the papers below.
2008
The Research Forum awarded fellowships to two postgraduate students giving research papers at the 2008 AAH Annual Conference in London. The recipients of the awards were Aliya Abykayeva de Tiesenhausen, and Hannah Williams. Hannah Williams presented a preview of her paper ‘Jean-Etienne Liotard: Other than Himself’ as part of the Early Modern Work-in-Progress Seminar on 25 February 2008. Aliya Abykayeva de Tiesenhausen presented her work-in-progress, ‘From War Memorial to the Beatles: Locating Kazakh Monu-mentality’, at the Research Forum on 14 March 2008.
2010
The Research Forum awarded fellowships to three postgraduate students who will give research papers at the 2010 AAH conference at the University of Glasgow. The recipients of the awards were: Jim Harris, Jack Hartnell, and Edward Payne. The three recipients will present a preview of their papers at the Research Forum on 12 March 2010. The titles of their papers are: Holy Wounds or a Good Kicking? Donatello, Vasari and the Varieties of Violence (Jim Harris); Spiritual Batteries: The Price of Reanimation and the Death of the Relic ( Jack Hartnell) and Britain’s Bête Noire? The Reception of Ribera in Nineteenth Century (Edward Payne).
Terra Foundation for American Art Travel Grants
2010
The Research Forum participates in awarding the Terra Foundation for American Art Travel Grants, in collaboration with the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, the John F. Kennedy Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität, Berlin, and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. This grant is awarded with the aim of developing the Terra Foundation’s support for international research projects that encourage young European scholars to travel to the United States for research purposes. Usually, three doctoral and three postdoctoral fellowships are awarded each year, with each of the participating institutes nominating up to three postdoctoral candidates and up to four doctoral candidates. This year, three awards were given to nominations forwarded by The Courtauld Institute of Art: Meredith Brown (doctoral, The Courtauld Institute of Art) for her project A History of A.I.R Gallery: Feminism and the Art Institution (1970s, New York); Melena Tomic (doctoral, University College London) for her project Re-enactment, Repetition and the Mise-en-scène after Modernism; and Dr. Anna Lovatt (postdoctoral, University of Nottingham) for her project
Drawing Degree Zero: The Line from Minimal to Conceptual Art.
View the 2010 competition results
2007
The Research Forum participates in awarding the Terra Foundation
for American Art Travel Grant, in collaboration with the
Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art and
the John F. Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien
at the Freie Universität in Berlin. This grant is awarded
with the aim of developing the Terra Foundation’s support
for international research projects that encourage young
European scholars to travel to the United States for research
purposes. Three doctoral and three post-doctoral fellowships
are awarded each year, with each of the participating institutes
nominating up to three post-doctoral candidates and up to
four doctoral candidates. This year, James Boaden, a third-year
PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute, received one of
the doctoral awards. He will travel to San Francisco to conduct
interviews with filmmakers and friends of artists featured
in his dissertation entitled “The Avant-Garde as Swain:
The Perpetually Outmoded and the Pastoral Attitude in the
United States, 1945-1965”. He will also travel to the
centre for the study of the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, currently
being set up at the University of Boulder in Colorado.
projects
WRITING ART HISTORY
A new Research Forum series of events
In 2007, the Research Forum launched a new series of lectures, workshops, conversations and symposia under the title “Writing Art History”. On the 30th May 2007, Professor Griselda Pollock gave the inaugural lecture entitled “Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum”. Professor Pollock discussed numerous issues on the ways in which art history is written, starting with the deceptively simple question “What do art historians look like?”. From this Professor Pollock discussed the necessity for histories of art to be situated in their cultural and political contexts, whilst advocating a ‘Warburgian’ approach, combining different art historical periods, styles and mediums.
“Writing Art History” was the theme for numerous Research Forum events, including the Frank Davis Lecture Series in academic years 2007-08, and 2008-09. As well, a core seminar group has been formed, and the first "Writing Art History" symposium took place on 21 June 2008. Details of lectures, seminars and symposia are regularly posted on the Research Forum’s events page.
immediations
The third issue of immediations. The cover
features a new painting, Language, by Howard Hodgkin
that was specially created for this year's immediations. Inside,
as well as articles on Andrea del Castagno and Paolo Uccello,
illustrations of Boccaccio, Christopher Wren, Renato Guttoso
and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the journal includes a transcript
of the conversation between Hans Belting and Henk van Os, which
took place during Hans Belting’s Visiting Professorship
at the Courtauld in May 2005.
More on immediations
The fourth
issue of immediations. Continuing
the journal’s series of commissioned covers, the artwork
for issue 4 has been designed by Josh Smith and Christopher
Wool. Inside, articles include discussions of drawings by
Sacchi and Guercino, Giorgio de Chirico’s Mannequins,
images of education in twelfth century sculpture and metalwork,
Coypel’s Children Playing at the Toilette,
Horace Vernet’s Prise de la Smala d’Abd el-Kader and
relational aesthetics in the work of Jens Haaning. The issue
concludes with a conversation between the 2006 Research Forum
Visiting Professor, Boris Groys, and John-Paul Stonard.
The Aesthetics of Publishing: The Art
Book as Object from Print to Digital
Professor Patricia Rubin, Head of the Research Forum, contributed a paper on “The Aesthetics of Publishing” at the CAA Annual Conference in New York, February 2007. This paper followed on from the research that has taken place at the Research Forum exploring issues around publishing art history. Professor Rubin’s paper was part of a panel convened by William Tronzo (Stanford Humanities Center) and Catherine Soussloff (University of California, Santa Cruz), which “identified the aesthetics of the art book as a central issue” and was one of a number of CAA sessions addressing the future of art publishing. Papers from this panel will be published in a special issue of Visual Resources on “Issues in Art History Publishing”, including papers by William Tronzo (Stanford Humanities Center), Susan Bielstein (University of Chicago Press), Catherine Soussloff (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Mariët Westermann (Institute of Fine Arts).
2005-6 Research Forum / Conway Library Project
Archaeologies of the Standpoint
Building on the success of the previous year’s Research
Forum / Conway Library project on the Persistence of Antiquity,
the 2005-6 Research Assistants were appointed to the Conway
Library to explore topics and prepare material in conjunction
with Visiting Professor Whitney Davis’s lectures and
seminars on Archaeologies of the Standpoint. The Assistants
presented their findings at two well-attended lunchtime seminars
held in March and June 2006. Their presentations can now be
viewed here:
Distinguished teachers
In the 2006 Spring term Professor Paul Crossley and Professor
John Lowden delivered their inaugural lectures as part of the
Friends Lecture Series, Distinguished Teachers. They
provided memorable introductions to one another's lectures,
and both lectures were rapturously received. Professor Lowden
has kindly agreed to make his text, Towards an Understanding
of the Bibles Moralisées, available here.
In addition, Professor Lowden has made his extensive
bibliography on the Bibles moralisées available on-line.
View
Professor Lowden's Bibles Moralisées bibliography
Frank Davis Lectures, Autumn Term 2005
Viewing time: artists on art and temporality
In a departure from tradition, the Frank Davis lectures in
the 2005 Autumn Term were given by artists rather than academics.
The series, entitled Viewing time: artists on art and temporality,
was convened by Professor Paul Hills, whose report on
the lectures is available here.
Art History: Research and Academic Publishing
Susan Bielstein, executive editor for art, architecture, film, and classical studies at the University of Chicago Press, delivered this paper on clearing copyright for images of artworks at the Art History: Research and Academic Publishing workshop event, organised by the Research Forum in collaboration with the Association of Art Historians on 3 June 2005 at the Courtauld Institute. The Research Forum is grateful to Susan Bielstein and CAA News for permission to reproduce her text here.
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