Research Forum
News & Reports
Opportunities
The Research Forum is pleased to announce:
- an AHRC-funded three-year Collaborative Doctoral Award studentship, starting October 2011, working with The Courtauld Institute of Art and Tate, Between God, Art and Mammon: Religious Painting as Public Spectacle in Britain, c.1800-1850
- four opportunities funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art: one-week Visiting Professorship; twelve-week Visiting Professorship; Postdoctoral Fellowship and Travel Grants.
The recipients for the 2011 Terra Foundation for American Art Travel Grants have now been announced.
appointments
research forum VISITING PROFESSORSHIPs
The Research Forum is pleased to announce that Carlo Ginzburg and Bronwen Wilson will be the Research Forum Visiting Professors for 2011-12.
Carlo Ginzburg is among the most distinguished of historians, celebrated for his pioneering work forging cohesive social and cultural histories from the application of disparate but complementary disciplines to precise contexts. Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles and the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, he has also taught and held fellowships at, among others, the University of Bologna, the Warburg Institute, Princeton, Yale and Columbia Universities and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Aby Warburg Prize (1992), the Humboldt-Forschungspreis (2007) and the Balzan Prize for the History of Europe, 1400-1700 (2010). His many books, translated into more than 20 languages, include: The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller (1980); The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1983) ; The Enigma of Piero della Francesca (1985); Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (1989); Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1991); Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (1998): The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice (1999); History, Rhetoric, and Proof (1999); No Island is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective (2000).
Bronwen Wilson received her PhD in Art History from Northwestern University in 1999 and is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. Following a Postdoctoral Fellowship at UBC in 1999-2000, she taught at McGill University from 2000-2007 before returning to Vancouver to take up her present post. In 2003-4 Bronwen Wilson was a Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, subsequent to which she published her first book, The World in Venice: print, the city, and early modern identity (2005), awarded the 2006 Roland H. Bainton prize for Art History. She is now preparing her second book, Facing Early Modernity: portraits, physiognomy, and naturalism in Northern Italy, for publication. Her current research ranges from the mediation of travel in the Ottoman Empire by visual representation, to the ways in which cultural representations contributed to new forms of association before the normalisation of the public sphere in the eighteenth century.
TERRA FOUNDATION for american art FELLOWSHIPS AND VISITING PROFESSORSHIPS
With sponsorship from the Terra
Foundation for American Art, the Research Forum awards a two-year fellowship for the teaching and
study of historical American art (pre-1980), as well two annual 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 enables 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.
The Research Forum is pleased to announce the results of the Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship and Visting Professorships for 2011-13, as follows:
Elisa Schaar, formerly Visiting Lecturer at the University of Warwick, has been appointed Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow for 2011-13. She recently completed her doctoral dissertation, Déjà-vu: The ‘Forerunners’ of Appropriation Art c. 1964-1974, at Oxford University.
Christopher Reed (Professor of English and Visual Culture, The Pennsylvania State University) has been appointed as Visiting Professor (Twelve Weeks) and will be at The Courtauld in autumn 2012.
Angela Miller (Professor, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Washington University)
has been appointed as Visiting Professor (One Week) and will be at The Courtauld in early summer 2012.
The holders of the Fellowship for 2009-11 and the Visiting Professorships for 2010-11 can be found here.
Research Forum Visiting Conservators
The Research Forum is pleased to announce that Neville Agnew and Ann Hoenigswald have been appointed Research Forum Visiting Conservators for the Academic Year 2011-12.
The appointment of Visiting Conservator is offered to conservators whose work plays a defining role in the discipline 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.
Neville Agnew is Senior Principal Project Specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles and a colleague of last year’s Visiting Conservator, Francesca Piqué. A chemist and conservator who trained in South Africa, Australia and England, he has worked on projects as varied as the Lark Quarry dinosaur stampede site in central Queensland, wall paintings in the Nefertari tomb and the Great Sphinx in Egypt, the bas-reliefs of the royal Palaces of Abomey and the Laetoli hominid trackway in Tanzania. As leader of the GCI’s China Initiative since 1989, his work has involved not only the conservation of World Heritage Sites including the Mogao and Yungang Buddhist grottoes but also the establishment of a heritage conservation charter, published as China Principles: Conservation and Management Principles for Cultural Heritage Sites in China, which is now established methodology in China and espoused by China ICOMOS. Dr Agnew is the author of over 100 publications in research chemistry and conservation, and recently edited Conservation of Ancient Sites on the Silk Road: Proceedings from the Second International Conference on the Conservation of Grotto Sites (2010). Whilst at the Courtauld Dr Agnew will be joined by his colleague from the GCI, Dr Martha Demas, who will collaborate on seminars in the Research Forum and the Courtauld Conservation Department.
Ann Hoenigswald is Senior Conservator of Paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Her research and practice as a conservator and conservation scientist have been widely published and her recent work on the Chester Dale Collection of Impressionist and Modernist Art has led to new insights into the materials and techniques of many of the most important painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Research Forum Visiting Curator
The Research Forum is pleased to announce that Rachel Ward has been appointed Research Forum Visiting Curator for the Academic Year 2011-12.
Rachel Ward was Curator (Middle East) in the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum from 1983 to 2000 and Director/Vice President of the Royal Asiatic Society from 2002 to 2008. Her research has been mainly focused on the history, art and archaeology of the Ayyubid and Mamluk period. Her publications include Süleyman the Magnificent, (co-author with J.M. Rogers, 1988); Islamic Metalwork (1993); Gilded and Enamelled Glass from the Middle East (editor, 1998) and many articles. She has lectured extensively for museums, universities and learned societies and is currently working on a Catalogue of Arab and Ottoman Metalwork in the British Museum and on the Mamluk glass finds from the excavation of the Citadel at Aleppo.
Archive of previous Visiting Curators
Research Forum/Andrew W Mellon Foundation MA Postdoctoral Fellowship
2011-2012
The Research Forum is pleased to announce that Monia Abdallah has been awarded the Research Forum/Andrew W Mellon Foundation MA Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2011-12. This fellowship offers an opportunity to an early-career scholar to pursue a research project while gaining teaching experience by delivering a BA course and collaborating on the Research Forum/Mellon Foundation M.A. course, this year being offered by
Professor Mignon Nixon and Professor
Juliet Mitchell: Art And Psychoanalysis: Fifty Years Of War In The Time Of Peace, 1960-2010. Monia Abdallah received her doctorate from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in December 2009 with a dissertation entitled Constructing the Continuous Progress of the Past: an inquiry into the notion of ‘Contemporary Islamic Art’ (1970-2009). Before taking up her post at the Courtauld, she was Postdoctoral Fellow for the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto
and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) .
Andrew W Mellon/Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellowship 2011 (Activities Co-ordinator)
The Research Forum is pleased to announce the appointment of Jim Harris as the Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow for 2011. The Fellowship, awarded annually to an early-career scholar who has completed their PhD at the Courtauld, enables the recipient to continue with their research, to prepare their work for publication and to work as part of the team co-ordinating the activities of the Research Forum. In addition, the Fellow is responsible for devising, organising and leading a major Research Forum project. In 2011-12, this will involve a series of three workshops and a conference addressing some of the questions raised by changes made over time to sculpture and its contexts: Three Approaches to Three Dimensions.
Previous recipients of the Fellowship have been John-Paul Stonard (2005), Douglas Brine (2006), Catherine Grant (2007), Judith Batalion (2008), Federico Botana (2009) and Francesco Lucchini (2010).
The 2011 Terra Foundation for American Art Travel Grant
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. The results of the 2011 competition have now been announced.
Association of Art Historians FELlowships 2011
Each year the Research Forum awards one or more fellowships to postgraduate students who give research papers at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians. The recipient of the award for the 2011 conference, held at the University of Warwick was Edward Payne. Edward presented a preview of his paper, entitled Ribera's Grotesque Heads: Between Anatomical Study and Cultural Curiosity, at the Research Forum on 16 March 2011.
Reports
LONDON/NAPLES ROVING SEMINAR 2011:
A collaboration between THE COURTAULD INSTITUTE OF ART
AND the UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI 'FEDERICO II', NAPLES
Edward Payne (Courtauld) and Professor Francesco Caglioti (Naples) in discussion before Ribera's The Flaying of Marsyas, Capodimonte, Naples, January 2010
Between 2008 and 2011, The Courtauld Institute of Art and the Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘Federico II’, held an annual ‘roving seminar’ exploring the rich and diverse art history of the Kingdom and city of Naples. Over the course of three visits to Naples, a group of twelve to fourteen Courtauld faculty, doctoral and postdoctoral scholars, led by Professor Patricia Rubin, were guided through the city by Professors Francesco Caglioti, Francesco Aceto and Tomaso Montanari, and a team of their colleagues and current and former students. On each occasion, we were privileged to be given not only extraordinary access to buildings and objects but a thorough grounding in the history and topography of the city and glimpses of a wealth of scholarship and new research, kindly shared by our Neapolitan hosts.
In February 2011, some twenty-five colleagues from Naples, and others from the universities of Messina and Catania, joined us at the Courtauld to conclude the Seminar in a return visit. The concluding seminar comprised two workshops, Showcasing New Research from Naples and London, and four days of visits to key London collections and buildings, all culminating in a memorable cena sociale. Remarkably, in addition to generous support from the Research Forum, the Seminar received substantial sponsorship from a private foundation which not only met the cost of our dinner but, more importantly, enabled ten of the Neapolitan scholars to be granted bursaries towards the cost of travel and accommodation, greatly increasing the scope of participation in the event.
The workshops, held in the Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, featured short papers over six sessions introducing postdoctoral and doctoral research on an enormously wide range of topics, from sexual imagery in antiquity to an Italian critique of eighteenth century English collections. The visits took us to the Prints and Drawings collections of the British Museum, the Courtauld and the Royal Library at Windsor; the showpiece painting cycles of Eton College chapel and the Banqueting House; the great London churches of Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s, St Mary Woolnoth and St Stephen Walbrook; and the collections of the Courtauld and National galleries, the V&A and Sir John Soane’s Museum. At every turn we were helped by curators and custodians who were unfailingly warm in their welcome and unstintingly generous with their time.
There were many highlights to the week’s events. The visit to Windsor was greatly enhanced by Martin Clayton’s willingness to unveil many of the greatest treasures of the Royal Collection. At Eton, not only the wall paintings but also the Burne-Jones tapestries and the building history of the chapel gave rise to interesting discussions. In London, we were guided around Westminster Abbey by Professor Paul Crossley and the Banqueting House by David Jaffe, climbing to the gallery before being gently ushered down by security. We were shown the Hours of Ferdinand of Aragon by Rowan Watson at the V&A and some of the rich manuscript collection of Soane’s Museum by Jerzy Kierkuc-Bielinski. In the City, the Churchwardens of St Mary Woolnoth and St Stephen Walbrook and the Canon Treasurer of St Paul’s, Canon Mark Oakley, all granted special access to the buildings in their care. Our thanks are due to all these and to the many colleagues at the Courtauld who also contributed to the seminar’s success.
As well as working together and discussing the objects of our study across boundaries of language and methodology during the visits themselves, the seminar has established productive relationships that will continue long into the future. From an initial desire to encourage research at the Courtauld on Neapolitan themes, a far more wide-ranging goal has been achieved: the establishment of a diverse and collaborative community of interest which will, over time, benefit not only the Courtauld and the Università degli Studi ‘Federico II’ but art-historical studies from classical antiquity to the verge of the modern period. In this sense, the seminar has reflected the aims and objectives of the Research Forum itself, bringing together scholars from within and without the Institute in order to further the discipline through discussion and debate.
Click the icon for the Programme for the February 2011 Workshops.
Warsaw University Nowoczesny UniwersyteT Short Fellowship
During May 2011, t he Research Forum was delighted to host Dr Luiza Nader of the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw, who visited the Courtauld as a beneficiary of the Nowoczesny Uniwersytet Short Fellowships Programme.
During her visit, Dr Nader worked with Dr Sarah Wilson, Dr Klara Kemp-Welch and other members of the Courtauld faculty and postdoctoral community, discussing common research interests and pedagogical methodologies. She has kindly written this brief report on her fellowship:
The Courtauld Institute of Art and the hospitality of knowledge
Thanks to the Nowoczesny Uniwersytet (Modern University) short fellowships programme, launched by my home institution, Warsaw University, I recently had a wonderful opportunity to visit the Courtauld Institute of Art. The aim of the programme is to support innovative teaching projects, providing the Fellows with the materials and knowledge to strengthen their teaching skills. I came to the Courtauld in the first half of May 2011, both to enhance my teaching and to pursue my current research project, entitled “The artist as an observer: art, history and the transmission of affects after 1945”.
The project focuses on the issue of visual representation, trauma and the role of the affect in social and political life after 1945, as well as on the relation between politics and psychoanalysis. My research also reflects on the function of the artist as an observer, the complicated relations between victim, persecutor and passerby, on memory and the processes of remembering, the possibilities and impossibilities of working through limited experiences, and on questions of responsibility and ethics in a “state of exception".
Although my visit to the Courtauld lasted only 2 weeks, it was very fruitful. First of all, I had the chance to consult on my project with members of the Institute’s faculty. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Sarah Wilson who kindly agreed to supervise my work, sharing with me her wide knowledge and supplying my project with a new conceptual framework.
Thanks to our conversations I gained a fresh perspective on the problems I was working on. I am also deeply thankful to Dr. Klara Kemp-Welch with whom I was able to discuss my ideas thoroughly, transforming and refining them, whilst gaining insight into her excellent teaching practice and fascinating research on postwar art in Central Europe. I’m grateful to Professor Caroline Arscott, Dr. Anthony Gardner and Dr. Catherine Grant who generously shared their knowledge and time with me, helping me greatly with their comments and bibliographical references.
By attending various Research Forum events, including the conference Perfoming Art History, I broadened my knowledge of new methods in teaching and presenting research in our discipline. Last but not least I’ve greatly benefited from using the rich resources of the Courtauld Library, where I collected many important texts, unavailable in Warsaw, for my forthcoming seminars and lectures. My way through the library system was made easier thanks to the comprehensive introduction of Philip Pearson.
My short stay at the Courtauld gave me an exceptional opportunity to review my research critically and to establish a pattern of knowledge for future publications, as well as my future seminar syllabi. New readings, compelling discussions, and the chance to pursue my research enriched my methodological abilities, contributing enormously to the development of my project on affects as embedded in works of art and art historical narration. My visit was spent in an atmosphere of generous exchange of ideas. The great ‘hospitality of knowledge’ represented by the Courtauld Institute of Art has been an exceptional experience and one I would like to share and pass on within my home context.
Projects
The Material Life of Things is the theme for a series of Research Forum project coordinated by Dr Francesco Lucchini starting in the academic year 2009-10 and culminating in 2011-12. Details of lectures, seminars and symposiums related to the project are regularly posted on the Research Forum’s events page.
As part of the project, scholars working across the discipline have been selected to join a research group to discuss various topics and address methodological questions within the theme of The Material Life of Things. The aim of the group is to provide a research community in which scholars can develop their individual projects, discuss aspects of the material life of works of art from different periods, clarifying theoretical and methodological issues and advancing our understanding of the subject. For more information see the project's webpage