appointments


Association of Art Historians FELlowships 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 Payn).

 

pdfDownload Abstracts


Research Forum/Andrew W Mellon Foundation MA Postdoctoral Fellowship 2009-2010

The Research Forum is pleased to announce that Stephanie Schwartz has been awarded the Research Forum/Andrew W Mellon Foundation MA Postdoctoral Fellowship.  This fellowship offers an opportunity to a young scholar to pursue a research project while gaining teaching experience by delivering a BA course and acting as a research assistant to the Research Forum/Mellon Foundation M.A. course being offered by Dr. Julian Stallabrass and Professor Malcolm Bull in 2009-2010 (Aestheticising Politics? The Political in Globalised Contemporary Art).    

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.

 

The 2009 Terra Foundation for American Art Travel Grant


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 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, two awards were given to nominations forwarded by the Courtauld Institute: Shir Aloni (pre-doctoral, Courtauld Institute) for her project Brushstrokes: Hair in the Work of Contemporary Women Artists; Dr. Sergio Cortesini (postdoctoral, Università degli Studi di Cassino) for his project The Diplomacy of Contemporary Italian Art in New Deal America.



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.


Wendy Ikemoto has been appointed Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow for 2009-11. She recently completed her doctoral dissertation Double Vision: Pendant Painting in Antebellum America at Harvard University. Jonathan D Katz ( Associate Professor and Chair, Visual Studies Doctoral Program, University at Buffalo; Guest Curator, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery) has been appointed as Visiting Professor for the period 2 November to 4 December 2009. In the Academic Year 2010-11, the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor will be Richard Meyer, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Director the Contemporary Project at the University of Southern California.

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.



projects


Cassoni Symposium

This one-day symposium was organised by Dr. Caroline Campbell to coincide with the exhibition Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence: The Courtauld Wedding Chests. Participants considered the manufacture and the conservation history of the cassoni and detached panels from chests belonging to The Courtauld Gallery, and those in the Victoria and Albert Museum which have been the subject of recent study. The purpose of this event was to promote object-based discussion, and to smimulate further the study of cassoni. Participants included:  Dora Thornton (The British Museum); Graeme Barraclough, Caroline Campbell, Caroline Elam, Alexandra Gerstein, and Patricia Rubin (The Courtauld Institute of Art); Simone Chiarugi (furniture restorer, Florence); Gianni Mazzoni (independent scholar); Alan Chong (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston); Achim Stiegel (Kunstgewerbe Museum, Berlin); Jill Dunkerton and Scott Nethersole (The National Gallery, London); Tilly Schmidt (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Stuttgart); Fausto Calderai (Studio Mazzei e Calderai, Florence); Nicola Costaras, Enrica Griseta, Nick Humphrey, Peta Motture, and James Yorke (Victoria & Albert Museum); Jacqueline Musacchio (Wellesley College, MA).

 

Photographic Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History


Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum, London, and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz — Max-Planck-Institut

In June 2009 a conference held at the Courtauld Institute in collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz investigated the role of photographic archives and collections in art historical studies. A second session of the conference was held in October in Florence in October 2009, where the history, nature, and influence of specific archives was discussed.

  • Click here for more details of these conferences, including surveys of Courtauld Institute of Art Witt and Conway Photographic Libraries, Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Frick Art Reference Library, Getty Research Institute, Fondazione Zeri, National Gallery of Art in Washington, and RKD ( Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie).

  • Click here for the Photographic Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History project at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.

 

RIHA COPYRIGHT STATEMENT


Since the workshop Art History: Research and Academic Publishing in June 2005, the Research Forum has been involved in a series of initiatives related to the problems posed for image-based research by copyright and licensing bodies. The Courtauld Institute of Art is a member of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art (RIHA), which has adopted the following resolution in order to express concern for inhibitions posed to the publication of art historical research:

 

 

 

Writing Art History

2009-10 will see the culminating event of the three-year project ‘Writing Art History.’ These series at the Research Forum has continued during the last academic year through the meetings of the seminar group and events open to the public. The conference held in the summer term 2008 on “Creative Writing and Art History” was a great success, provoking much debate from the audience. Invited speakers included Adrian Rifkin, Carol Mavor, Tom Gretton and Elizabeth Eger, who spoke on a diverse range of topics, from Carol Mavor’s reading from her new novel to Adrian Rifkin’s interfacing of pornography with critical theory. These speakers were joined by members of the Writing Art History seminar group, with papers from Gavin Parkinson, Stephanie Porras and Jeremy Melius.

In the Spring Term 2009, the series continued with the conference entitled “On the Agenda?,” focusing on the boundaries of art history, and with a lecture and a conversation by Hayden White. This was followed in the Summer Term by 'The Formats of Art History: The Art Book and the Exhibition,' which looked at the ‘formats’ of the discipline, particularly the art book. The concluding event will be a two-day conference on 13 and 14 November 2009 to showcase the work of the seminar group. In addition, a collection of essays produced from the work of the Writing Art History seminar group and associated events will be published in April 2011 as a special issue of Art History under the title Creative Writing and Art History, edited by Catherine Grant and Patricia Rubin.

Other 'Writing Art History' events in the academic year 2008-09 included the Frank Davis lectures, themed 'Writing Art History: Off the Page'. The series featured an exciting range of speakers who have themselves made art history through performance, exhibitions, the internet, and television, including: Dr Charlie Gere (Reader in New Media Research and Director of the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University), Andrea Fraser (Associate Professor, Department of Art, UCLA; and faculty, Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program), Professor Mark Hallett (Department of History of Art, University of York), and Dr Alixe Bovey (School of History, University of Kent).  In the Summer Term 2009, events included a round-table discussion on 'Writing about Giotto,' organised by Giotto's Circle.  The panel of this round table consisted of three authors who have recently published books on the painter: Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona (Hood College, Maryland), authors of The Usurer’s Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni and the Arena Chapel in Padua (University Park: Penn State Press, 2008); and Laura Jacobus (Birkbeck College, University of London), author of Giotto and the Arena Chapel: Art, Architecture and Experience (London: Harvey Miller, 2008). 

Further investigation of the modes or writing art history will take place in the affiliated Clever Object project.




 

Publications

 

 

The New Issue of immediations

 

immediations cover

The fifth issue of immediations, the Courtauld Institute’s journal of postgraduate research, is now available.

This issue comes with a changed subtitle, to reflect more accurately the authorial and editorial origins of the journal.  Thus, we are now ‘The Courtauld Institute of Art Journal of Postgraduate Research’.

This issue's cover is by the photographer and film-maker Ori Gersht and comes from his series of images Blow up, based on a flower still life by Henri Fantin-Latour.

The launch will be held on Saturday July 5th, as part of the Courtauld 75th Anniversary celebrations.


More on immediations