Research Forum

Associate scholars

Academic Year 2012-2013

 

Shir Aloni

 

Jack Hartnell

 

Klara Kemp-Welch

Klara Kemp-Welch is the Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at The Courtauld for 2009-12. She is researching artistic exchange between the countries of the former Soviet ‘bloc’ and former Yugoslavia by initiating a project titled Festivals and Friendships: Networking the ‘bloc.’ The aim of this three year project is to collect and to compare artists’ stories and memories of the years 1956-1991, and to establish how ideas and information were conveyed across borders in the late socialist period. Klara is currently also completing the manuscript of a book titled Not Playing Politics: Anti-Heroism in Central European Art 1965-1989. She has published reviews, articles in journals, and catalogue essays on political aspects of modern and contemporary art. These include studies of work by Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Beres, Endre Tót, and Sanja Ivekovic.

 

Ayla Lepine

Ayla Lepine has a BA in History in Art from the University of Victoria (2003), a PGDip in Theology from Oxford University (2004), and both an MA (2005) and PhD (2011) from The Courtauld. Her doctoral research, supervised by Professor Caroline Arscott, explored George Frederick Bodley and Thomas Garner's architectural commissions for Oxford and Cambridge. Ayla has held Visiting Lecturer positions at King's College London, the V&A, Warwick University, and The Courtauld. Her publications have appeared in The Architects' Journal, The Burlington Magazine, Art and Christianity and The Tablet. Her research interests include queer perspectives on nineteenth-century art, the intersections of theology and the arts, monastic and convent art and architecture in modern Britain, and the persistence of the Gothic Revival beyond the nineteenth century. She is currently the 2012 Andrew W. Mellon Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow (Activities Co-ordinator) at The Courtauld. Her project, 'Revival: Utopia, Memory, Identity' includes a workshop, conference, lecture series and online exhibition. In 2013 she will be an Associate Fellow at Yale University's Institute of Sacred Music.

 

Maria Mileeva

Maria Mileeva has recently completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she currently teaches courses on Russian twentieth century art at both graduate and undergraduate level. Her doctoral thesis examined exhibitions of Western art in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s with a particular focus on the history of the State Museum of New Western Art (GMNZI), Moscow. Previously, she read Art History at Jesus College, Cambridge. Maria has also worked as an Assistant Curator of ‘Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970’, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in autumn 2008. Her research interests include cultural exchange between Russia and the West over the course of the 20th century, with particular focus on the politics of international exhibition design and the construction of art historical narratives as a means of defining national identity and cultural policy. Her latest research project explores the discourse of centre and periphery in Soviet cultural and institutional history by looking at a network of regional art museums in the peripheral outposts of Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku, Kiev, Kharkov, Saratov and Kazan. She is the administrator of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (CCRAC). 

 

Oliver Norris

 

Paula Nuttall

 

Christopher Reed

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.

 

Tim Satterthwaite

Tim Satterthwaite is a second-year PhD student with Gavin Parkinson on an AHRC scholarship. His research explores German and French photo-illustrated magazines, 1925-34. As part of his doctoral study, he is developing a new methodology, called pattern theory, to describe perceptual grouping phenomena in visual images. He is a 2012-13 contributor to the Views and Reviews blog.

 

Rose Walker

 

Kuenga Wangmo

 

Rachel Worth

 

Edward Wouk

Edward Wouk completed his PhD at Harvard University in 2010 with a dissertation on the Flemish painter and draftsman Frans Floris de Vriendt (1519/20-1570) and is currently completing a monograph on the artist and his humanist circle. His catalogue raisonné of Floris’s graphic art appeared in the New Hollstein series in 2011 and was awarded the Wolfgang-Ratjen Prize from the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. After teaching Renaissance art history and theory at the Universität Zürich in 2010-2011, he returned to New York to complete a Chester Dale Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A specialist in northern European art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, his current interests include the historiography of Netherlandish art, print culture and artistic exchange, and the intersection of artistic practice and scientific inquiry in the early modern period.

 

Academic year 2009-10

Elizabeth Bartman
Elizabeth Bartman is a specialist in Greek and Roman art. She is presently working on two major projects: a study of ethnic identity in Roman portraiture and of the "ideal" sculpture – images of gods, mythic figures, personifications, etc. as opposed to historical personages – collected by Henry Blundell in the late eighteenth century for his estate at Ince outside Liverpool. The largest private collection ever assembled in Britain, Blundell's statues present a cross-section of Roman decorative sculpture; heavily restored, they are as much a reflection of eighteenth-century art as of ancient. Working with this material has led her into new areas of research such as the Grand Tour, collecting, and the reception of the antique. She was elected First Vice-President of the Archaeological Institute of America in January 2007.

Jessica Berenbeim
Jessica Berenbeim is the 2009–11 Kress Fellow at the Courtauld Institute.  Her Ph.D. thesis, for Harvard University, concerns the Sherborne Missal (produced c.1400) and the role of documentary literacy and legal consciousness in artistic representation.  Her research interests include the history of book production, reading, and literacy; the history and art of monasticism; medieval historiography and conceptions of the past; and the relationship of bureaucracy and institutional history to developments in the visual arts.  Publications include: ‘Script after Print: Juan de Yciar and the Art of Writing’ (forthcoming in Word & Image); ‘Milanese Chant in the Monastery?’ (co-authored; in Ambrosiana at Harvard, ed. by Thomas Forrest Kelly and Matthew Mugmon, 2009); and ‘An English Manuscript of the Somme le roi’ (in Cambridge Illuminations, ed. by Stella Panayotova, 2007).

Federico Botana

Federico Botana's research focuses on the relationship between visual culture and social practices in the Late Middle Ages. At present, he is completing a book on the representation of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy in medieval Italy, and starting a research project on didactic uses of manuscript illustration in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Tuscany. In 2009 he was the Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow and the organiser of ‘Imaging Dogma, Picturing Belief.’ At these conference scholars from the UK, ten European countries, and the United States presented research on late-medieval mural cycles in parish churches and chapels across Europe.  Since 2008 Federico has worked at The Courtauld and Birkbeck College as a visiting lecturer on Italian late-medieval and renaissance art.  His publications include: ‘Virtuous and Sinful Uses of Temporal Wealth in the Breviari d’Amor of Matfre Ermengaud,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LXVII (2004); ‘Like the Members of a Body: Assisting the Poor in Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’Amor,’ in Armut und Armenfürsorge in der italienischen Stadkultur zwischen 13. und 16. Jarhunderts (Frankfurt, 2006)

Lucy Bradnock

Lucy Bradnock is currently completing her PhD at the University of Essex on the reception of Antonin Artaud in American art during the period 1949-65. Her research focuses on various artists, including Wallace Berman, John Cage, Bruce Conner, Carolee Schneemann and Robert Rauschenberg.  Central to her work are issues of literary transmission, translation, and the problems of Surrealist legacy. Lucy Bradnock has presented her research at conferences at Tate Modern, The Courtauld Institute, and in CAA and AAH conferences. She published an article on Nancy Spero's engagement with Artaud in Papers of Surrealism (issue 3, spring 2005); she is a founder-editor of rebus, the Essex postgraduate journal of art history and theory; a visiting lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art; and has been recently appointed coordinator of the Research Forum Writing Art History seminar group.

Meredith Brown
Meredith Brown is a Visiting Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art where she is also a PhD candidate. Her thesis, entitled A History of A.I.R. Gallery: Feminism and the Art Institution, focuses on the institutional history of the first women's cooperative gallery in the United States and its impact on the feminist art movement and on other alternative art spaces in 1970s and 1980s America. Her recently published articles include 'Ms. Chicago and the California Girls' and 'Recipes' in The Moon, a publication accompanying the event 'Once More with Feeling' at Tate Modern, 27 June 2009. In 2003 she co-curated an exhibition of Modern and contemporary art at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University and contributed to its catalogue. Her current research interests include the intersection of feminist politics and pedagogy, representations of labor and bureaucracy, and artistic collaboration.

Zirwat Chowdhury

Zirwat Chowdhury is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. Her dissertation, Anglo-Indian Encounters: British Art and Architecture, 1780-1836 examines landscape paintings, antiquarian studies, caricatures, portraits and architecture. She is especially interested in how the British conceptualisation of Indian architecture emerged from visual encounters with India that hinged on both inter-mediality and the protean nature of British colonial expansion.

Robin Cormack

Robin Cormack is an eminent Byzantinist; he has recently been rewarded with the title of ‘Emeritus Professor’ after a long teaching career at The Courtauld Institute.  His publications include several major studies, notably his articles on the mosaics of St. Sophia at Thessaloniki (1981) and on the Icon of St. Peter at Chora (1983); and his monographs Writing in Gold: Byzantine Society and its Icons (1985), and Painting the soul: Icons, death masks and shrouds (1997). He has recently co-curated with Adrian Locke and Maria Vassilaki the exhibition Byzantium  at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Charlotte de Mille

Charlotte de Mille completed her doctoral thesis ‘Bergson in Britain c. 1890-1914’ in 2009. Current research activities include an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of intuition as a method for Art History though the work of Henri Bergson and Virginia Woolf with the Research Forum’s Writing Art History group. With the Research Forum and the RMA, Charlotte was convenor of Music and Modernism, held in May 2009, from which she will be editing a volume of essays. With Public Programmes for The Courtauld Gallery, she is co-ordinating a series of lecture-recitals that seek to draw together music and fine art, and has also commissioned new music in conjunction with The Courtauld’s East Wing VIII exhibition of contemporary visual art. Charlotte is Visiting Lecturer for the academic year 2009-2010.

Caroline Elam

Caroline Elam's research interests include many areas of Italian renaissance art, architecture and urbanism, as well as the history of  art history and criticism since the mid nineteenth century. She is currently completing a book on Roger Fry and Italian Art for Yale University Press, and writing a chapter on 'Art in Lorenzo de' Magnifico's Florence' for a volume on Renaissance Florence to be published by Cambridge University Press. She has recently co-curated and edited the catalogue of an exhibition on Michelangelo's architectural drawings for the Centro Palladiano in Vicenza (closing 10 December 2006) which will move to the Casa Buonarroti, Florence, from 15 December to 19 March 2007. Her next project is a book to be called The Urban Face of Renaissance Florence.

Rebecca Farbstein

Rebecca Farbstein’s research bridges the fields of art history, archaeology, and anthropology to explore the way prehistoric artists made some of the world’s earliest art. This interdisciplinary research investigates fundamental questions about the origins of symbolism and the ways technological innovation, creativity and symbolism intersected in the production of some of the world’s most ancient art.  Her research develops a technological and material-based methodology that reconstructs the processes that transform a raw material from its found form into a piece of art. This methodology involves visual assessment of the objects, experimentation with the raw materials, and contextual analysis of other finds and raw materials found at study sites. She previously focused on Upper Palaeolithic art in Central Europe and completed her PhD at Cambridge in 2008.  Her previous publications related to this research include: ‘New finds of Upper Paleolithic decorative objects from Predmostí, Czech Republic,’ (with J. Svoboda) in Antiquity, 81(2007); ‘Rethinking constructions of the body in Pavlovian portable art: a material-based approach,’ in  Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 21(2006). She is currently co-editing a volume of papers about representation, image and technology. As Caroline Villers Research Fellow for 2009-10, she will study approximately 400 objects curated at the British Museum. These figurines, excavated from sites in western Europe and dating to between 17-11,000 years before present, present the opportunity to study the convergence of technique and appearance in art found in different contexts and made in distinct raw materials including antler, bone, mammoth ivory and stone. 

Sander L. Gilman

Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University, where he is the Director of the Program in Psychoanalysis and the Health Sciences Humanities Initiative. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over eighty books. His Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity appeared in 2008; his most recent edited volume, Race and Contemporary Medicine:  Biological Facts and Fictions was published that same year. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies.  For six years he held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago and for four years was a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine and creator of the Humanities Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  During 1990-1991 he served as the Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; 1996-1997 as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA; 2000-2001 as a Berlin prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; 2004-5 as the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University.  He has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in North America, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Germany, and New Zealand, and, in 2008-09 he was Visiting Professor at The Courtauld Institute teaching in collaboration with Shulamith Behr on the Research Forum / Andrew W Mellon Foundation MA Arts in Exile in Britain 1933-1945: Politics and Cultural Identity.  He was president of the Modern Language Association in 1995.  He has been awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) at the University of Toronto in 1997, elected an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin (2000), and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2007).

Teresa Gleadowe

Teresa Gleadowe was the founding director of the MA programme Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art and directed the course from 1992 to 2006. During this period the department pioneered research into relationships between contemporary art and curatorial practice and developed a series of ambitious international art exhibitions selected and curated by students on the course. Teresa Gleadowe is now continuing her research into aspects of recent curatorial history and is Commissioning Editor for a new series of books, which will provide a historical study and critical appraisal of significant exhibitions of contemporary art in the period from the mid-twentieth century to the present.

Catherine Grant

Catherine Grant completed her PhD, entitled Different Girls: performances of adolescence in contemporary photographic portraits at The Courtauld Institute in 2006. Her research interests include the representation of adolescence and femininity in photography, the theorisation of spectatorship and identification in relation to the photographic portrait, and the intersection between queer theory and feminism. Her current research builds on her PhD, which is being prepared for publication in various formats. She was the 2007 Research Forum Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art and is currently the coordinator for the Research Forum’s Writing Art History seminar group, as well as being a Teaching Fellow at the Slade School of Art and a Visiting Lecturer at The Courtauld.

Jim Harris

Jim Harris is a Visiting Lecturer at The Courtauld and is completing a PhD on the treated surfaces of fifteenth century sculpture, with particular regard to the painted and gilded sculpture of Donatello.  His research interests also touch more broadly on sculptural techniques and on the relationship between theology and representation.  He is a member of the Sculptural Processes research group and has edited immediations The Courtauld Postgraduate Research Journal, for two years.  Jim has published on André Beauneveu, Northern polychromed sculpture, Florentine painting and contemporary drawing and is involved with the Public Programmes department at The Courtauld.  He is also a Director of the contemporary gallery Man and Eve, where he recently curated In Place: new collage works by Sarah Bridgland.

Melena Hope

Melena Hope completed her PhD, entitled 'Painted Domestic Chapels and Oratories in the Households of Fifteenth-Century France,' at The Courtauld Institute of Art in January 2009.  Since 2008 she has been the Bob McCarthy Post-Doctoral Fellow, working in collaboration with the Conway Library at The Courtauld.  Part of the fellowship is devoted to a research and digitisation project aiming to catalogue and make available over 4,000 images of wall paintings.  In addition to her work on this image collection, she is also undertaking two personal research projects which investigate examples of fifteenth-century mural decoration in French chapels.  While her specific interests centre around religious wall paintings in domestic and other 'private' settings, she is more broadly interested in the function and audience of devotional art, the relationship between artworks of different media (especially the interplay between works of art and their architectural settings), and artistic culture in Northern Europe in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  She is a visiting lecturer at The Courtauld (since 2007) and the University of Kent, and has taught at Birkbeck College. 

 

Wendy Ikemoto

Wendy Ikemoto is the 2009-2011 Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art.  She 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.  Ikemoto 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.

Philippa Kaina

Philippa Kaina is a Visiting Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art and the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Reading. She recently completed her PhD, ‘Between History and Modernity: Negotiating subjectivity in the early work of Edgar Degas, c. 1854-1870,’ at University College London. As well as developing this project for publication in various formats she is also investigating the deployment of seriality and repetition as a key pictorial strategies in Degas’ oeuvre and the connections between the artist’s ‘early’ and ‘late’ work, particularly in relation to his imagery of the female body. Her wider research interests intersect with the broader historical milieu of nineteenth-century French art and visual culture. Key concerns here include: the demise of the academic ideal and its implications for the genre of the nude, the ‘de-militarization’ of the male body together with its implications for masculine subjectivity, and the reception and cultural interpretation of Near and Middle Eastern antiquities in western colonial contexts.

Klara Kemp-Welch
Klara Kemp-Welch is the Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at The Courtauld for 2009-12. She is researching artistic exchange between the countries of the former Soviet ‘bloc’ and former Yugoslavia by initiating a project titled Festivals and Friendships: Networking the ‘bloc.’ The aim of this three year project is to collect and to compare artists’ stories and memories of the years 1956-1991, and to establish how ideas and information were conveyed across borders in the late socialist period. Klara is currently also completing the manuscript of a book titled Not Playing Politics: Anti-Heroism in Central European Art 1965-1989. She has published reviews, articles in journals, and catalogue essays on political aspects of modern and contemporary art. These include studies of work by Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Beres, Endre Tót, and Sanja Ivekovic.

Caroline Levitt

Caroline Levitt specialises in French art and literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; she completed her PhD on the relationship between Guillaume Apollinaire and André Breton as manifested through their involvement and interest in artistic practices such as graffiti, illustration, cinema and the collection and construction of objects. Her article ‘Screening poetry: Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton and experimental cinema’ appeared in the 2008 issue of Immediations. Over the next year, Caroline plans to develop interests emerging from her doctoral research, in particular her work on Le Corbusier, which she hopes will form the basis of a book. Other research interests include collaborations between artists, writers and craftsmen and the relationships between literature and sculpture. Caroline is a visiting lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art.

Ayla Lepine
A Visiting Lecturer at The Courtauld this year, Ayla Lepine is completing a PhD with Caroline Arscott. Titled ‘Sacred Beauty: George Frederick Bodley’s Designs for Oxford and Cambridge, 1858-1907’, her thesis research investigates points of intersection between the Gothic Revival and Victorian theology. She has lectured widely and currently teaches courses on nineteenth-century architecture and on gender and subjectivity in Victorian painting. In collaboration with Laura Cleaver, she is co-convenor of the Research Forum conference, ‘Gothic and its Legacies’, held in December 2009. Her forthcoming publications explore music and architecture in Victorian Cambridge, and sculpture and the gothic impulse at Washington National Cathedral. She works with Public Programmes at The Courtauld Gallery and is a historic buildings researcher for Donald Insall Associates. Ayla is the curator of Threads of Heaven: Ten Centuries of English Ecclesiastical Textiles, a major exhibition which will take place at St Paul’s Cathedral in autumn 2011.

Francesco Lucchini

Francesco Lucchini was the 2010 Research Forum postodoctoral Fellow. He completed his PhD, entitled ‘Objects at Work: a Material and Cultural History of the Reliquaries of St Anthony of Padua in the Basilica del Santo, ca.1231-1448 at The Courtauld in 2009. His interests cover a wide spectrum of medieval artifacts and techniques, including metalwork and material aspects of early Italian painting. Under the aegis of the Research Forum, he is currently organizing a research project on the Material Life of Things which aims to explore the production, manipulation, exchange and consumption of artefacts throughout their life histories. He is also co-organizing an inter-institutional research projects seeking to define the category of the Clever Object as a tool of art-historical interpretation. Forthcoming publications include: ‘Face, Counterface, Counterfeit. The Lost Silver Visage of the Reliquary of St. Anthony’s Jawbone,’ in Meaning in Motion: Semantics of Movement in Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. G. Freni and N. Zchomelidse (Princeton University Press, Forthcoming, 2010); ‘The Making of a Legend. The Reliquary of the Tongue and the Representation of St Anthony of Padua as a Preacher,’ in Franciscan Preaching, ed. T. J. Johnson (Brill, Forthcoming, 2010); ‘Circolazione di reliquie e committenza di reliquiari al Santo nel primo Quattrocento,’ in Cultura arte e committenza al Santo nel Quattrocento, eds. G. Baldissin Molli and L. Bertazzo (Padua, Forthcoming, 2010).

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Mark McDonald

Mark McDonald is Curator of Old Master prints and Spanish drawings at the British Museum. His research interest include sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish art, and European printmaking during the Renaissance. His recent publication The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus 1488-1539: a Renaissance collector in Seville was awarded the Mitchell Prize for Art History, the Eleanor Tufts Award for Hispanic studies in 2006, and named the Book of the Year by Apollo in 2004. His current and future research interests include Italian Chiaroscuro prints, the print collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo, Goya and Spanish drawings.

Alexandra Moschovi

Dr Alexandra Moschovi's research has concentrated on the institutionalisation of photography in the 1980s and 1990s, exploring how its belated accommodation in the modern/contemporary art museum ushered in an ontological reassessment not only of its properties as a fine art practice, but also of the museum's foundational values. Her research interests also include British and American cultural policies and issues relating to contemporary politics of representation. Recent curatorial projects have focused on the fusion of the private into the public and the changing morpheme of the post-industrial landscape in contemporary photographic practice. She is currently working on the recontextualisation of nineteenth-century photographs in various institutions, examining their collecting and taxonomic biography and how their use and exhibition value has changed.

Austin Nevin

Austin Nevin is involved in the Andrew W. Mellon funded "Master of the Fogg Pieta – Maestro di Figline Project" – a project which aims to create a research-based website, integrating art historical and technical information about a group of related but dispersed works by the Master of the Fogg Pietà, a major but little-studied artist, active in Florence and Assisi, c.1310– c.1330 (also known as the  Maestro di  Figline). Two of the panels from this putative ensemble belong to The Courtauld Institute, London, the Harvard University Art Museums and in other European and American museums. The pilot project will bring together "virtually" the various pieces that have been associated with a single ensemble by the Master of the Fogg Pietà, together with detailed information concerning their conservation, physical characteristics and history.  This will provide the basis for further research and study of the probable components of this altarpiece, and has the potential to expand from this nucleus to a consideration of the wider oeuvre of the Master, an artist of considerable technical interest, who worked in fresco and as a stained glass designer as well as on panel.

Divia Patel

Divia Patel is a curator in the Asian Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her areas of expertise include 19th century photography of India, contemporary Indian art and popular culture. She has recently co-curated an exhibition of paintings by western artists in India from the 17th -20th centuries, which will be touring in India during 2009. She curated the award wining, internationally touring exhibition, Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood and the photography section of the V&A exhibition, Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms (1999).  Her current projects include a display of photographs of Buddhist sites across Asia for April 2009, and research on contemporary design in India. Her publications include Cinema India: The Visual Culture of the Hindi Film, Reaktion Press, 2002, and articles on photography, contemporary art and the paintings of Ajanta. 

Edward Payne

Edward Payne is a Visiting Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art. He is currently completing his PhD thesis entitled ‘Violence and Corporality in the Art of Jusepe de Ribera’, which examines the problematic relationship between the imagery of suffering and the social history of violence in seventeenth-century Naples and Rome. In 2009 Edward held a three-month Rome Award at the British School at Rome, which enabled him to pursue research in the criminal archives at the Archivio di Stato di Roma. In 2008 he co-convened with Scott Nethersole a symposium entitled ‘Histories of Violence: Italy and the Mediterranean c.1300–1700,’ and this year he is co-convening with Hannah Williams the Inaugural Early Modern Symposium, ‘Everyday Objects: Art and Experience in Early Modern Europe’. Additionally, from 2007–08 Edward worked as a Print Room Assistant in The Courtauld Gallery Prints and Drawings Room, and his article ‘Dealing with Art: Pier Francesco Mola’s Caricature of Three Ecclesiastics’, which investigates a drawing from the collection, will be published in the 2009 issue of immediations. His current research interests include seventeenth-century Italian (especially Neapolitan) and Spanish painting, prints and drawings – particularly the work of Caravaggio, Ribera, Rosa and Zurbarán – and the reception of the Spanish School in nineteenth-century Britain and France. 

Kathryn Rudy

Kathryn Rudy (Kate) specializes in late medieval manuscripts of the Low Countries. She has written articles about the manuscript precedents of Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs; the earliest visual interpretation of the Ghent Altarpiece; illustrated manuscripts for instructing children; words as devotional objects; as well as several articles about medieval pilgrimage both real and imagined, culminating in a book (forthcoming) titled Nuns’ and Religious Women’s Virtual Pilgrimages in the Late Middle Ages. Other recent work includes an investigation of the manuscripts produced at the Franciscan Convent of St. Ursula in Delft. Her three long-term projects concentrate on the reception and original function of manuscripts: she has built a database to reconstruct fifteenth-century manuscripts whose prints have been cut out of them. She has compiled several thousand Middle Dutch rubrics that provide instructions for votaries in front of images for a book provisionally titled The Spiritual Economy of Images: The Performance of Prayer on the Eve of the Reformation in the Low Countries . Thirdly, she has nearly completed a book called The Prayerbook as Talisman in Late Medieval Flanders. At The Courtauld she will quantify grime and patterns of use in medieval manuscripts with the aid of a densitometer in a project called “Dirty Books.” She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in Art History, and also holds a Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies from the University of Toronto. She has held research, teaching, and curatorial positions in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Stephanie Schwartz
Stephanie Schwartz recently completed a two-year term as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Theory of Photography at Bryn Mawr College. She received her doctoral degree from the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in 2007. Her dissertation, The Crime of Cuba: Urbanism, Photography, and the Geopolitics of Americanization, developed an interdisciplinary framework for examining the relationship between modern aesthetic practices and the politics of decolonization. In addition to writing Cuba Per Diem: Walker Evans and American Photographs, a book-length study of Evans’s 1933 Cuba portfolio, Stephanie is developing a new project on contemporary Cuban photography.

Evgeny Steiner

Evgeny Steiner is a specialist in traditional Japanese art and in the 19th-20th centuries Russian art. His books include Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children's Books (Univ. of Washington Press, 1999; Russian enlarged edition, 2002); Zen-Life: Ikkyu and Beyond (St.Petersburg, 2006; English edition is under preparation); Catalog of Japanese Prints in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, 2 volumes (Moscow, 2008 – edited, translated Japanese poetry and wrote about 650 entries); Victory Over the Sun (London, 2008 – translated trans-rational Russian Futurist texts with commentaries and introduction). Prof. Steiner is Senior Research Associate at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts (based at School of Oriental & African Studies, London) and Principal Research Fellow of the Russian Institute for Cultural Research (Moscow). His current project deals with European uncatalogued repositories of art displaced as a result of WWII. To enable him to work on this project, Prof. Steiner was named International & Area Studies Fellow '08-09 by the American Council of Learned Societies and Wingate Scholar by the Wingate Foundation.

Mika Takiguchi
Mika Takiguchi is associate professor at Meiji University in Tokyo. She completed her PhD, entitled ‘Illuminated Gospel Books and the Perception of the Role of Images in Byzantium,’ at the Courtauld Institute in 2003. Several articles based on her doctoral research have been published or are being prepared for publication in various formats, mainly in Japanese.  Mika’s research is currently developing in three inter-connected areas. The first is the subject of her PhD, illuminated manuscripts.  Through her doctoral research, she investigated Byzantine Gospel manuscripts in the British Library, and expansion of this study into illuminated manuscripts in lands surrounding Byzantium is planned for coming years. The second area stemmed from her involvement in archaeological excavations in Turkey. She is currently completing a chapter on capitals for a book entitled Research of Early Byzantine Sites in Lycia, Turkey, to be published by Osaka University Press, in which she explores the questions of quarries, ateliers, mass production and transportation, design and iconography of capitals. The last area developed from her interest in the floor mosaics in Byzantine churches, which she investigated in excavation sites in Lycia.  Working with this material has led Mika into new areas of research, such as floor mosaics in Italy or in the Middle East and their association with Byzantium.

Zahira Véliz

Zahira Véliz has published frequently on the subject of Spanish drawings, especially the work of Alonso Cano. She has organised exhibitions at the Museo del Prado, Madrid and at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, Oviedo, Spain. In 2006 she organised a Wallace Collection exhibition focusing on Lady with a Fan by Velázquez, together with the variant from Chatsworth. Trained originally as an art conservator, she has contributed many articles to the literature of technical art history, and in 1986 she published Artists’ Treatises in Golden Age Spain (Cambridge University Press).  She has written numerous articles and lectured widely on Spanish art in the early modern era, and, as a member of the Centro de Estudios de Europa Hispánica (Madrid) is currently cataloguing the Spanish drawings in the collection of The Courtauld Institute, and working on the reconstruction of William Stirling-Maxwell’s drawings collection. 

Laura Veneskey

Laura Veneskey is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University.  Her research investigates the circulation of sacred sites through portable artifacts between Late Antiquity and the Middle Byzantine period.  It is particularly concerned with the varying methods through which sacred place was evoked, recreated, and reused in disparate contexts, engendering sanctity in new locations and forging networks of power throughout the medieval Mediterranean.  She is also presently working on a translation and commentary of a portion of the Patriarch Nikephoros' Refutatio et eversio.

Rose Walker

Rose Walker is a specialist in medieval Spanish art. She is currently working on a project that focuses on the interaction between culture and landscape. The British Academy is funding four field trips that constitute the first phase of this project. Each trip takes one of the principal Roman roads that crossed the Iberian peninsula and seeks alternative narratives to 'the pilgrimage route' and 'the re-conquest'.  These narratives are revealed through diversions, detours and changes of direction that together demonstrate a new sense of belonging amongst the people who settled and built on new and old sites. A photographic record of the routes and of the art and architecture that defined them is an important part of the project.

Giles Waterfield

Giles Waterfield is an independent curator and writer, Associate Scholar at The Courtauld Institute of Art and Director of Royal Collection Studies. He taught The Courtauld's M.A. in the History and Theory of The Art Museum, and has worked as Head of Education at the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums and as Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery from 1979 to 1996.  He was joint curator of the exhibition Art Treasures of England at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1998, In Celebration: The Art of the Country House at the Tate Gallery in 1998 and Below Stairs, National Portrait Galleries, London and Edinburgh, in 2003-4.  He is an authority on the history of museums and his publications include: Palaces of Art, Art for the People and Soane and Death, as well as three novels. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, a Vice-President of NADFAS and Trustee of Charleston, Sussex.

Hannah Williams

Hannah Williams is a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. A specialist in French art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hannah is currently completing her PhD thesis entitled Portrait of the Artist: An Ethnography of the Paris Académie Royale c.1648-1793, which examines the cultural value of portraits and self-portraits within this institutional community. In 2008-9, Hannah was awarded a twelve-month fellowship in Paris as The Courtauld Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre Allemand de l’Histoire de l’Art, where she undertook archival research on the history of the Académie Royale and its collections. She has published her research in The Courtauld postgraduate research journal, immediations (2007), and has articles forthcoming in the French online journal of the INHA and the EHESS, Images Re-vues (October 2009), and in a book edited by Markus Castor et al (eds.), Re-Invention: Zur Etablierung der Druckgraphik als künstlerisches Medium (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009). Hannah has presented papers at several conferences in the UK, France and Australia: in 2007, she co-convened with Alister Mill the AAH New Voices Symposium, ‘Art and Memory’ (Courtauld); in 2008, she co-convened with Mary Roberts a session on ‘Self-Portraiture and Representations of the Artist’ at the AAH Annual Conference (Tate Britain); and this year she is co-convening with Edward Payne the Inaugural Early Modern Symposium at The Courtauld, ‘Everyday Objects: Art and Experience in Early Modern Europe.’

Catherine Yvard

Catherine Yvard is currently working as Project Officer on the Gothic Ivories Project, at the Courtauld (2008-2011). She has previously worked on medieval illuminated manuscripts digitisation projects at the British Library in London, the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. She teaches a Summer School at the Courtauld Institute focusing on illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages and has taught several courses related to this topic at Trinity College, Dublin and University College, Dublin. Her publications include ‘The Glenstal Prayer Book’, in Art and Devotion in Medieval Ireland, (Dublin, 2006), pp. 98-120, and 'Un livre d'heures inédit à la Chester Beatty Library de Dublin', in Art de l'enluminure, 19 (Dec. 2006-Feb. 2007), pp. 2-65. She specialises in the study of late-medieval Books of Hours and is particularly interested in the transition from manuscript to printed, and the transmission of patterns through time and space. She is now also turning her attention to ivories, as she will be working closely with them over the next few years

 

Academic year 2008-09

Elizabeth Bartman

Elizabeth Bartman is a specialist in Greek and Roman art. In 2008-09, she was working on two major projects: a study of ethnic identity in Roman portraiture and of the "ideal" sculpture – images of gods, mythic figures, personifications, etc. as opposed to historical personages – collected by Henry Blundell in the late eighteenth century for his estate at Ince outside Liverpool. The largest private collection ever assembled in Britain, Blundell's statues present a cross-section of Roman decorative sculpture; heavily restored, they are as much a reflection of eighteenth-century art as of ancient. Working with this material has led her into new areas of research such as the Grand Tour, collecting, and the reception of the antique. She was elected First Vice-President of the Archaeological Institute of America in January 2007.

 

Judith Batalion

Judith Batalion was the 2008 Research Forum Fellow. She completed her PhD, entitled 'Mad Mothers, Fast Friends, and Twisted Sisters: Women's Collaborations in the Visual Arts (1970-2000)' in 2007. Judith's research interests include creative collaboration, representations of domesticity, feminist performance art, the history of friendship, humour, and the relationships between science and art.  During her fellowship, she edited a collection of writing about comedy audiences.

James Boaden

James Boaden's PhD research engaged with questions of nostalgia and the pastoral genre in collage, assembled sculpture and experimental film in 1950s America. James has published articles on the subject in the Courtauld Institute's research journal immediations as well as the on-line journal of the AHRC Centre for Surrealism and its Legacies: Papers of Surrealism. James has also conducted freelance curatorial work for the exhibition 'Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933-1957' (Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, 2005) and for the screenings entitled 'Lights Up: American Structural Film' at the National Film Theatre, London in 2006.

 

Federico Botana

Federico Botana is the 2009 Research Forum Fellow.  His research focuses on the relationship between visual culture and social practices in the Late Middle Ages. Hewas completing a book on the representation of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy in medieval Italy.  His previous publications included: ‘Virtuous and Sinful Uses of Temporal Wealth in the Breviari d’Amor of Matfre Ermengaud,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LXVII (2004); ‘Like the Members of a Body: Assisting the Poor in Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’Amor,’ in Armut und Armenfürsorge in der italienischen Stadkultur zwischen 13. und 16. Jarhunderts, edited by Philine Helas and Gerhard Wolf (Frankfurt, 2006).   

Lucy Bradnock

In 2008-09, Lucy Bradnock was completing her PhD at the University of Essex on the reception of Antonin Artaud in American art during the period 1949-65. Her research focuses on various artists, including Wallace Berman, John Cage, Bruce Conner, Carolee Schneemann and Robert Rauschenberg.  Central to her work are issues of literary transmission, translation, and the problems of Surrealist legacy. Lucy Bradnock has presented her research at conferences at Tate Modern, The Courtauld Institute, and in CAA and AAH conferences. She published an article on Nancy Spero's engagement with Artaud in Papers of Surrealism (issue 3, spring 2005); she is a founder-editor of rebus, the Essex postgraduate journal of art history and theory; a visiting lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art; and has been recently appointed coordinator of the Research Forum Writing Art History seminar group.

 

Benedict Burbridge

Benedict Burbridge is a writer and curator with a particular interest in contemporary art and the history of photography. He is currently undertaking doctoral research at the Courtauld Institute, focusing on the influence of nineteenth-century scientific and pseudo-scientific photography upon contemporary photographic art. A Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld, Benedict has also worked as a Researcher with the visual arts organization Photoworks, commissioning new photography, managing and curating exhibitions, producing publications and a bi-annual magazine. Recent exhibitions include We Are Witnessing the Dawn of an Unknown Science at the Permanent Gallery in Brighton; No Passaran! at Charleston Farmhouse in Firle; and Mass Observation at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid, as part of PhotoEspana 2005. He has written regularly for Photoworks magazine and has contributed essays to publications including Henna Nadeem: A Picture Book of Britain (Photoworks, 2006) and Pavillion Commissions 2007 (Pavilion, 2007).

 

Robin Cormack

Robin Cormack is an eminent Byzantinist and has been rewarded with the title of ‘Emeritus Professor’ after a long teaching career at the Courtauld Institute.  His publications include several major studies, notably his articles on the mosaics of St. Sophia at Thessaloniki (1981) and on the Icon of St. Peter at Chora (1983); and his monographs Writing in Gold: Byzantine Society and its Icons (1985), and Painting the soul: Icons, death masks and shrouds (1997). He has recently co-curated with Adrian Locke and Maria Vassilaki the exhibition Byzantium  at the Royal Academy of Arts.

 

Charlotte de Mille

In 2008-09, Charlotte de Mille’s research developped in three inter-connected areas. First was the subject of her PhD, which was near completion. This doctoral work investigated the impact of French philosopher Henri Bergson on British Modernism c. 1890 – 1914, and expansion of this study into the 1920s was planned for the coming year. Second was her involvement with the Research Forum’s “Writing Art History” group, for which she explored the possibilities and limitations of intuition as a method for Art History though the work of Henri Bergson and Virginia Woolf. Lastly, was an interest in the relation between the disciplines of music and the fine arts in the Modern period, on which she organised a conference entitled “Music and Modernism” taking place in May 2009 with the help of the Research Forum. In 2008-09, Charlotte was a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute.

 

Peter Dent

Peter Dent was a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow.  Heworked on a project entitled 'Sculpture and the Senses in Late Medieval Italy'. This concentrated on the strategies that Italian sculptors employed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in order to communicate a sense of 'presence'. Beyond the immediate historical contexts for this enquiry, he also explored how developments during this period related to the long running theoretical debate about the nature of sculpture, in particular its ability to stimulate the sense of touch, in contrast to painting, which is primarily concerned with sight. This interest grew out of research conducted for his PhD, The Body of Christ in Fourteenth-Century Tuscan Sculpture, undertaken at the Courtauld Institute of Art and completed in 2005. More generally, he is interested in the relationships between sculpture and painting.

 

Caroline Elam

Caroline Elam's research interests include many areas of Italian renaissance art, architecture and urbanism, as well as the history of  art history and criticism since the mid nineteenth century. In 2008-09, she was completing a book on Roger Fry and Italian Art for Yale University Press, and writing a chapter on 'Art in Lorenzo de' Magnifico's Florence' for a volume on Renaissance Florence to be published by Cambridge University Press. She co-curated and edited the catalogue of an exhibition on Michelangelo's architectural drawings for the Centro Palladiano in Vicenza (closing 10 December 2006) which moved to the Casa Buonarroti, Florence, from 15 December to 19 March 2007. Her next project was a book to be called The Urban Face of Renaissance Florence.

 

Sander L. Gilman

Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University, where he is the Director of the Program in Psychoanalysis and the Health Sciences Humanities Initiative. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over eighty books. His Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity appeared in 2008; his most recent edited volume, Race and Contemporary Medicine:  Biological Facts and Fictions was published that same year. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies.  For six years he held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago and for four years was a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine and creator of the Humanities Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  During 1990-1991 he served as the Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; 1996-1997 as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA; 2000-2001 as a Berlin prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; 2004-5 as the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University.  He has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in North America, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Germany, and New Zealand, and, in 2008-09 he was Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute teaching in collaboration with Shulamith Behr on the Research Forum / Andrew W Mellon Foundation MA Arts in Exile in Britain 1933-1945: Politics and Cultural Identity.  He was president of the Modern Language Association in 1995.  He has been awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) at the University of Toronto in 1997, elected an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin (2000), and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2007).

 

Teresa Gleadowe

Teresa Gleadowe was the founding director of the MA programme Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art and directed the course from 1992 to 2006. During this period the department pioneered research into relationships between contemporary art and curatorial practice and developed a series of ambitious international art exhibitions selected and curated by students on the course. In 2008-09, Teresa Gleadowe was continuing her research into aspects of recent curatorial history and was Commissioning Editor for a new series of books, which will provide a historical study and critical appraisal of significant exhibitions of contemporary art in the period from the mid-twentieth century to the present.

Linda Goddard

Linda Goddard was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her research focuses on the relationship between painting and literature, as well as art criticism and artists' writings in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France. She completed her PhD, Aesthetic Hierarchies: interchange and rivalry between the visual arts and literature in France, c.1890-c.1920 at the Courtauld in 2004, and has since taught at the Courtauld and the University of Cambridge. During her fellowship, she was researching the writings of Paul Gauguin in the context of interdisciplinary tension and interaction in fin-de-siècle France. She has published two articles, 'Birds of a Feather? Gauguin's ambivalent relationship with literary symbolism', immediations: the research journal of the Courtauld Institute of Art, 2005 and 'Mallarmé, Picasso and the aesthetic of the newspaper', Word & Image, October-December 2006, and co-edited the exhibition catalogue Literary Circles: artist, author, word and image in Britain, 1800-1920, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2006.

 

Catherine Grant

Catherine Grant completed her PhD, entitled Different Girls: performances of adolescence in contemporary photographic portraits at the Courtauld Institute in 2006. Her research interests include the representation of adolescence and femininity in photography, the theorisation of spectatorship and identification in relation to the photographic portrait, and the intersection between queer theory and feminism. Her research built on her PhD, which was being prepared for publication in various formats. She was the 2007 Research Forum Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art and in 2008-09 she was the coordinator for the Research Forum’s Writing Art History seminar group, as well as being a Teaching Fellow at the Slade School of Art and a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld.

Melena Hope

In 2008-09, Melena Hope was the Bob McCarthy Post-Doctoral Fellow working in collaboration with the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art.  In 2008, she submitted her doctoral thesis entitled 'Painted Domestic Chapels and Oratories in the Households of Fifteenth-Century France'.  While her specific interests centre around religious wall paintings in domestic and other 'private' settings, she is more broadly interested in the function and audience of devotional art, the relationship between artworks of different media (especially the interplay between works of art and their architectural settings), and artistic culture in Northern Europe in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In addition to her own research, she was also a visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. 

 

Maria Kokkori

As a Caroline Villers postdoctoral Fellow, her aim was to study Alexander Rodchenko's paintings from the perspective of technical art history. Alexander Rodchenko was one of the most vivid artists of the Russian avant-garde, and, especially, of the constructivism movement. His work encompasses a remarkable diversity of mediums and fields of endeavour: painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, graphics, photomontage, designs for utilitarian objects and photography. This project built on her doctoral work focusing on the analysis of the Rodchenko's techniques and materials, in relation to the aesthetic and compositional results, together with consideration of the history and the critical perception of Rodchenko's paintings, and the place of the examined paintings in the evolution of his work. The making of the pictures, the attitudes to materials, brushworks and colours of the works were investigated. Practices, themes, and attitudes were explored within the broader context of the Russian avant-garde. Kokkori's study focused on the examination of Rodchenko’s paintings from the Costakis collection and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The technical examination of the materials and painting techniques used by the painter, intergraded with an analysis of his theoretical and practical aims as these are expressed in the artist’s writings, comments and practices of his contemporaries, aimed at providing a new perspective on the relationship between making and meaning in the examined works, and, also, to increase our understanding of the complex applied skills and artistic practices of the Russian avant-garde artists. The results not only gave insights into the relationship between theory and practice, and into techniques and workshop practices, they also contributed to issues of condition and authenticity .

 

Caroline Levitt

In 2008-09, Caroline Levitt was a visiting lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art.  She was then completing her PhD on the relationship between Guillaume Apollinaire and André Breton as manifested through their involvement and interest in artistic practices such as graffiti, illustration, cinema and the collection and construction of objects. She published an article in the 2007 issue of Immediations, entitled ‘Screening poetry: Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton and experimental cinema’. Specialising in French art and literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, other research interests, which she was planning to develop over the next few years, included the relationships between literature and sculpture, the work of Le Corbusier and the participation of artists in the decorative arts.

 

Mark McDonald

Mark McDonald is Curator of Old Master prints and Spanish drawings at the British Museum. His research interest include sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish art, and European printmaking during the Renaissance. His recent publication The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus 1488-1539: a Renaissance collector in Seville was awarded the Mitchell Prize for Art History, the Eleanor Tufts Award for Hispanic studies in 2006, and named the Book of the Year by Apollo in 2004. His current and future research interests include Italian Chiaroscuro prints, the print collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo, Goya and Spanish drawings.

 

Charles Miller

In 2008-09, Charlie Miller was Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld, from which he received his PhD in 2006 for The Ambivalent Eye: Picasso 1925-1933. From 2005 to 2007 he was research fellow at the AHRC Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies, University of Essex. He published three pieces, 'Apocalypse', 'Archaeology' and 'Pablo Picasso', in Ades and Baker, eds., Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS (Hayward Gallery and MIT Press, 2006), winner of the Art Newspaper & AXA Art Exhibition Catalogue Award. He is editor of 'The Use-Value of Documents', a special issue of the Papers of Surrealism (Autumn 2007), to which he has contributed a critical 'Introduction', an article entitled 'Bataille with Picasso: Crucifixion and Apocalypse', and a translation of an essay by Georges Didi-Huberman. His general research areas are the production and reception of Picasso, and the history and theory of the avant-garde. He was working on articles and a book about Picasso and surrealism. A second book project concerns avant-garde (ab)uses of history.

 

Alexandra Moschovi

Dr Alexandra Moschovi's research has concentrated on the institutionalisation of photography in the 1980s and 1990s, exploring how its belated accommodation in the modern/contemporary art museum ushered in an ontological reassessment not only of its properties as a fine art practice, but also of the museum's foundational values. Her research interests also include British and American cultural policies and issues relating to contemporary politics of representation. Recent curatorial projects have focused on the fusion of the private into the public and the changing morpheme of the post-industrial landscape in contemporary photographic practice. She was working on the recontextualisation of nineteenth-century photographs in various institutions, examining their collecting and taxonomic biography and how their use and exhibition value has changed.

 

Austin Nevin

Austin Nevin is involved in the Andrew W. Mellon funded "Master of the Fogg Pieta – Maestro di Figline Project" – a project which aims to create a research-based website, integrating art historical and technical information about a group of
related but dispersed works by the Master of the Fogg Pietà, a major
but little-studied artist, active in Florence and Assisi, c.1310 –
c.1330 (also known as the  Maestro di  Figline). Two of the panels
from this putative ensemble belong to the Courtauld Institute, London,
the Harvard University Art Museums and in other European and American
museums. The intention of the pilot project is to bring together "virtually" the various
pieces that have been associated with a single ensemble by the Master
of the Fogg Pietà, together with detailed information concerning their
conservation, physical characteristics and history.  This provided
the basis for further research and study of the probable components of
this altarpiece, and has the potential to expand from this nucleus to
a consideration of the wider oeuvre of the Master, an artist of
considerable technical interest, who worked in fresco and as a stained
glass designer as well as on panel.

 

Divia Patel

Divia Patel is a curator in the Asian Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her areas of expertise include 19th century photography of India, contemporary Indian art and popular culture. She co-curated an exhibition of paintings by western artists in India from the 17th -20th centuries, which toured in India during 2009. She curated the award wining, internationally touring exhibition, Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood and the photography section of the V&A exhibition, Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms (1999).  Her projects in 2008-09 included a display of photographs of Buddhist sites across Asia for April 2009, and research on contemporary design in India. Her publications include Cinema India: The Visual Culture of the Hindi Film, Reaktion Press, 2002, and articles on photography, contemporary art and the paintings of Ajanta. 

 

Andreas Puth

In 2008-09, Andreas Puth was a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld, teaching English and French Gothic architecture. He is interested in medieval architecture across Europe and has investigated fourteenth-century buildings in the Holy Roman Empire as settings for public imagery in urban contexts. Two articles on representations of the emperor and the seven electors on the trade hall in Mainz and the ruler imagery of Emperor Charles IV on the main parish church at Muhlhausen were in the press. He was completing his PhD thesis, 'Imitatio Caroli, Imitatio Rudolphi?,'  reconsidering Habsburg dynastic representation c. 1360 to c. 1490. This looked at the visual strategies employed in various media by a "new" dynasty in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Central Europe in order to foster an own identity and to advance its political ambitions. The thesis located Habsburg ruler imagery in a pan-European context, employing methodological revisions such as the questioning of the concept of 'court art' not yet sufficiently applied to Central European ruler patronage, and challenging the art-historical model of imitatio which has traditionally focused on the model allegedly provided for the Habsburgs by Charles IV and the court art and architecture he inspired in Prague. Publication of a conference paper on these issues is also forthcoming. 

 

Evgeny Steiner

Evgeny Steiner is a specialist in traditional Japanese art and in the 19th-20th centuries Russian art. His books include Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children's Books (Univ. of Washington Press, 1999; Russian enlarged edition, 2002); Zen-Life: Ikkyu and Beyond (St.Petersburg, 2006; English edition is under preparation); Catalog of Japanese Prints in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, 2 volumes, (Moscow, 2008 – edited, translated Japanese poetry and wrote about 650 entries); Victory Over the Sun, (London, 2008 – translated trans-rational Russian Futurist texts with commentaries and introduction). Prof. Steiner is Senior Research Associate at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts (based at School of Oriental & African Studies, London) and Principal Research Fellow of the Russian Institute for Cultural Research (Moscow). In 2008-09, his project dealed with European uncatalogued repositories of art displaced as a result of WWII. To enable him to work on this project, Prof. Steiner was named International & Area Studies Fellow '08-09 by the American Council of Learned Societies and Wingate Scholar by the Wingate Foundation.

 

Kate Stonor

Kate Stonor is a conservator with a special interest in the technical study of paintings with a view to illuminating artistic practice. Her research was based on British paintings in the Courtauld Gallery Collection and she undertook studies on both modern painters, such as Walter Richard Sickert, and Stuart painters, including Sir Peter Lely. Along with her colleague, Clare Richardson, Kate was working on an online database of colourmen's stamps to aid both conservators and art historians to identify the markings left by artists' suppliers on the reverse of paintings and give a specific date range for the production of the support. This database will build into a large reference collection, allowing people to search by artist or artistic group to look at patterns of use for types of support and artists' supplier.

 

Zahira Veliz

Zahira Véliz has published frequently on the subject of Spanish drawings, especially the work of Alonso Cano. She has organised exhibitions at the Museo del Prado, Madrid and at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, Oviedo, Spain. In 2006 she organised a Wallace Collection exhibition focusing on Lady with a Fan by Velázquez, together with the variant from Chatsworth. Trained originally as an art conservator, she has contributed many articles to the literature of technical art history, and in 1986 she published Artists’ Treatises in Golden Age Spain (Cambridge University Press).  She has written numerous articles and lectured widely on Spanish art in the early modern era, and, as a member of the Centro de Estudios de Europa Hispánica (Madrid) is currently cataloguing the Spanish drawings in the collection of the Courtauld Institute, and working on the reconstruction of William Stirling-Maxwell’s drawings collection. 

 

Laura Veneskey

Laura Veneskey was a PhD candidate at Northwestern University.  Her research investigated the circulation of sacred sites through portable artifacts between Late Antiquity and the Middle Byzantine period.  It was particularly concerned with the varying methods through which sacred place was evoked, recreated, and reused in disparate contexts, engendering sanctity in new locations and forging networks of power throughout the medieval Mediterranean.  She wasworking on a translation and commentary of a portion of the Patriarch Nikephoros' Refutatio et eversio.

 

Aurélie Verdier

Aurélie Verdier was a PhD candidate at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and a curator. Her thesis was entitled 'Francis Picabia, Avant-Gardism and Ego Politics', and focused on how an 'empty' subjectivity transformed modernism during the teens. In 2008-09, she was working on expressions of identity in the avant-garde, specifically portraiture and the name. She worked on related themes for several years and has published regularly in Les Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne ('Ego Dada', Summer 2004; 'La Fabrique du silence. Mythologie et mise en scène chez Marcel Duchamp', Spring 2006) and has published an introduction book to Dada in 2005 (Flammarion). She was the recipient of the Henri Focillon Fellowship at Yale University (Autumn 2006).

 

Rose Walker

Rose Walker is a specialist in medieval Spanish art. She was working on a project that focuses on the interaction between culture and landscape. The British Academy funded four field trips that constituted the first phase of this project. Each trip took one of the principal Roman roads that crossed the Iberian peninsula seeking alternative narratives to 'the pilgrimage route' and 'the re-conquest'.  These narratives were revealed through diversions, detours and changes of direction that together demonstrated a new sense of belonging amongst the people who settled and built on new and old sites. A photographic record of the routes and of the art and architecture that defined them was an important part of the project.

 

Giles Waterfield

Giles Waterfield is an independent curator and writer, Associate Scholar at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Director of Royal Collection Studies. He taught the Courtauld's M.A. in the History and Theory of The Art Museum, and has worked as Head of Education at the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums and as Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery from 1979 to 1996.  He was joint curator of the exhibition Art Treasures of England at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1998, In Celebration: The Art of the Country House at the Tate Gallery in 1998 and Below Stairs, National Portrait Galleries, London and Edinburgh, in 2003-4.  He is an authority on the history of museums and his publications include: Palaces of Art, Art for the People and Soane and Death, as well as three novels. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, a Vice-President of NADFAS and Trustee of Charleston, Sussex.

 

Rachel Wells

Rachel Wells was a Henry Moore Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. She was extending her PhD thesis on scale in contemporary sculpture in order to publish this research. Evaluating the relationship between Postmodernism and the trend of enlargements, miniaturisations and life-size sculptures made since the 1990s, the research also encompassed the photographic reproduction of this work.

 

Catherine Yvard

Catherine Yvard started at the Courtauld in 2008 working as Project Officer on the Survey of Gothic Ivories. Until then, she was cataloguing medieval and Renaissance manuscripts for the online Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, and had worked previously on the medieval manuscripts collections at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. She has taught several courses on illuminated manuscripts in the late Middle Ages at Trinity College, Dublin and University College, Dublin. Her publications include ‘The Glenstal Prayer Book’, in Art and Devotion in Medieval Ireland, (Dublin, 2006), pp. 98-120, and 'Un livre d'heures inédit à la Chester Beatty Library de Dublin', in Art de l'enluminure, 19 (Dec. 2006-Feb. 2007), pp. 2-65. She specialises in the study of late-medieval Books of Hours and is particularly interested in the transition from manuscript to printed, and in the transmission of patterns through time and space. She was then turning her attention to ivories, as she was to be working closely with them over the next few years.

Academic Year 2007-8

Elizabeth Bartman
Elizabeth Bartman is a specialist in Greek and Roman art. She is presently working on two major projects: a study of ethnic identity in Roman portraiture and of the "ideal" sculpture – images of gods, mythic figures, personifications, etc. as opposed to historical personages – collected by Henry Blundell in the late eighteenth century for his estate at Ince outside Liverpool. The largest private collection ever assembled in Britain, Blundell's statues present a cross-section of Roman decorative sculpture; heavily restored, they are as much a reflection of eighteenth-century art as of ancient. Working with this material has led her into new areas of research such as the Grand Tour, collecting, and the reception of the antique. She was elected First Vice-President of the Archaeological Institute of America in January 2007.

 

Lee Beard
Lee Beard is a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He completed his PhD, entitled "Modernist Cell" or "Gentle Nest"; Ben Nicholson, Art, Design and the Modern Interior 1924-1939, at the Courtauld in 2003. His current research is a development of themes originating from this project, in particular those concerned with the relationship between modern art and the domestic interior in Britain during the early to mid- twentieth century. Focusing on the period 1919-1959, and working under the title 'Living with Modernism', his aim is to evaluate the many ideologies and strategies that have informed and shaped the interaction between art and notions domesticity in modernist production and display. In May 2007 Lee organised a two-day conference on Ben Nicholson at the Courtauld, and his essay 'Pottery as precedent: Herbert Read and the sculptural form' is published in Re-Reading Read: New Views of Herbert Read (Freedom Press, 2007).

James Boaden
James Boaden's PhD research engages with questions of nostalgia and the pastoral genre in collage, assembled sculpture and experimental film in 1950s America. James has published articles on the subject in the Courtauld Institute's scholarly journal immediations as well as the on-line journal of the AHRC Centre for Surrealism and its Legacies: Papers of Surrealism. James has also conducted freelance curatorial work for the exhibition 'Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933-1957' (Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, 2005) and for the screenings entitled 'Lights Up: American Structural Film' at the National Film Theatre, London in 2006.

 

John Cherry
John Cherry, who retired as Keeper of Medieval and Modern Europe in the British Museum in 2002, has research interests that include medieval metalwork, seals, jewellery and ivories. He is currently working with Professor John Lowden on a publication of the medieval objects in the Thomson collection, which is to be displayed in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, from 2008. He has also published many articles on seal and seal matrices, and is currently working on a catalogue of the Rawlinson collection of medieval and post-medieval seal matrices in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Secular iconography on seals and their matrices is a particular interest.

Peter Dent
Peter Dent is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow.  He is currently working on a project entitled 'Sculpture and the Senses in Late Medieval Italy'. This will concentrate on the strategies that Italian sculptors employed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in order to communicate a sense of 'presence'. Beyond the immediate historical contexts for this enquiry, he is also exploring how developments during this period may relate to the long running theoretical debate about the nature of sculpture, in particular its ability to stimulate the sense of touch, in contrast to painting, which is primarily concerned with sight. This interest grew out of research conducted for his PhD, The Body of Christ in Fourteenth-Century Tuscan Sculpture, undertaken at the Courtauld Institute of Art and completed in 2005. More generally, he is interested in the relationships between sculpture and painting.

Caroline Elam
Caroline Elam's research interests include many areas of Italian renaissance art, architecture and urbanism, as well as the history of  art history and criticism since the mid nineteenth century. She is currently completing a book on Roger Fry and Italian Art for Yale University Press, and writing a chapter on 'Art in Lorenzo de' Magnifico's Florence' for a volume on Renaissance Florence to be published by Cambridge University Press. She has recently co-curated and edited the catalogue of an exhibition on Michelangelo's architectural drawings for the Centro Palladiano in Vicenza (closing 10 December 2006) which will move to the Casa Buonarroti, Florence, from 15 December to 19 March 2007. Her next project is a book to be called The Urban Face of Renaissance Florence. 

Stefania Gerevini
Stefania Gerevini's PhD research concerns issues of artistic portability, importation and reuse in the middle ages. More specifically, it concentrates on the acquisition of Byzantine artefacts in Venice and Siena in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and on the material, functional and symbolic modifications that such objects underwent in the process of their translation from east to west to their new cultures. More broadly interested in artistic exchanges between Byzantium and its neighbouring cultures, she carried out a field project on the reuse of Byzantine spolia in Seljuk religious architecture in Central Turkey as a grantee of the Fondation M. de Montalembert in 2006, and taught at Università L. Bocconi, Milan, a course of Intercultural Studies in 2007. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Helen Glanville
Helen Glanville is an independent scholar, researcher and a practicing conservator of paintings, and was a visiting lecturer at the Courtauld until July 2007 on the MA “History and Theory of the Art Museum 1750-present day”. April 2007 saw the publication of her translation of Alessandro Conti’s History of the Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art (Elsevier/Heinemann), which provides the first history of the practice for the English speaking world, as well as a glossary of terms for the non-specialist and an introductory essay on “Relativity and Restoration”.

The grey areas between perception and the material aspects of painting, and the sciences linked to perception are a particular field of interest. Glanville’s research on these topics covers a wide historical range, including articles on “Veracity, Verisimilitude and Optics in Italy at the turn of the seventeenth century” (Italian Studies, 2001) and nineteenth century colour theories in Pre-Raphaelite Painting Techniques (Tate Gallery Publications, 2004, ed. Joyce Townsend) looking in particular at Eastlake’s translation of Goethe’s Theory of Colour. Glanville’s research in these areas focuses particularly on texts dealing with visual perception of the arts and aesthetics in relation to the practices and materials in painting from the turn of the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, and in later translations of these texts (for instance of Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting), as well as the applications of the theories of relativity to the arts (and indeed the philosophy and practice of restoration).

Glanville’s most recent publication (in press) is an essay entitled “Cesare Brandi, Newton and the National Gallery”. Another on-going area of research involves trawling through the National Gallery Archives with a view to writing a book on the history of the cleaning controversies at the National Gallery from the 1850s to the present day, from a European perspective.

Teresa Gleadowe
Teresa Gleadowe was the founding director of the MA programme Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art and directed the course from 1992 to 2006. During this period the department pioneered research into relationships between contemporary art and curatorial practice and developed a series of ambitious international art exhibitions selected and curated by students on the course. Teresa Gleadowe is now continuing her research into aspects of recent curatorial history and is Commissioning Editor for a new series of books, which will provide a historical study and critical appraisal of significant exhibitions of contemporary art in the period from the mid-twentieth century to the present.

 

Linda Goddard
Linda Goddard is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her research focuses on the relationship between painting and literature, as well as art criticism and artists' writings in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France. She completed her PhD, Aesthetic Hierarchies: interchange and rivalry between the visual arts and literature in France, c.1890-c.1920 at the Courtauld in 2004, and has since taught at the Courtauld and the University of Cambridge. She is currently researching the writings of Paul Gauguin in the context of interdisciplinary tension and interaction in fin-de-siècle France. She has published two articles, 'Birds of a Feather? Gauguin's ambivalent relationship with literary symbolism', immediations: the research journal of the Courtauld Institute of Art, 2005 and 'Mallarmé, Picasso and the aesthetic of the newspaper', Word & Image, October-December 2006, and co-edited the exhibition catalogue Literary Circles: artist, author, word and image in Britain, 1800-1920, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2006.

Melena Hope
Melena Hope is currently working towards a doctoral degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her research concerns the iconographical content and function of painted chapels and oratories in the households of fifteenth-century France.  While her specific interests centre around religious wall paintings in domestic settings, she is more broadly interested in the function and audience of 'private' devotional artworks, the relationship between artworks of different media (especially the interplay between works of art and their architectural settings), the working methods of artists in this period, and artistic culture in Northern Europe in the fifteenth century. In addition to her research, she is a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld and a Sessional Lecturer at Birkbeck College.

 

Matthew Hunter
Matthew Hunter is a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in August 2007, writing a dissertation entitled "Robert Hooke Fecit: Making and Knowing in Restoration London." His research interests include early modern art and architecture, representation in art and science, and theories of artistic community. He is currently preparing publications on the work and thought of Robert Hooke, while editing a collection of essays on representation in interdisciplinary perspective. His recent publications include "Iconoclasm and Consumption; or, Household Management According to Thomas Cromwell," in Iconoclasm: Contested Images, Contested Terms (Ashgate, 2007).

 

Pascal Labreuche
Pascal Labreuche is an independent painting conservator and researcher in history of technology; specialising in the study of artists' suppliers in the nineteenth century, French canvas makers, and the history of invention in the field of artists paintings supports. He completed his PhD in history of science and technology, entitled Commercially primed artists canvases in Paris, 1793-1867. The industrialization of a procedure involving tradition and innovation, at the Université de Nantes (France) in 2005. As fellow of the Caroline Villers Research Fellowship at the Courtauld Institute of Art, he is currently focusing his research on the comparison of the invention movement between the UK, France and USA during the nineteenth century, especially through the study of patents, trademarks, and archives and documents related to paintings supports.

Forthcoming publications: "Scientists, artists and colourmen in the first half of 19th century: a collaboration serving the French School of Paintings", revue Alliage, 2007; La toile à peindre à Paris au 19e siècle. Inventions et mutations techniques, Paris: CTHS/INHA, coll. "L'art et l'essai", c. 300 p.

Publications: "New documents on kinship between Haro family and Etienne Rey, and theory about the Haro shop foundation date", Bulletin de la Société des amis du Musée national Eugène Delacroix, n° 5, April 2007, pp. 38-41; "The conservation of portraits of the Grand Sitting Hall. Genesis and rearrangements of the setting under the July Monarchy", in Babelon, Jean-Pierre (dir.), Le Palais de l'Institut. Du Collège des Quatre-Nations à l'Institut de France, Paris: Nicolas Chaudun, 2005, pp. 138-153; "Parisian canvas' and stretchers suppliers from 1800 to 1880: a survey based on the paintings at the Condé Museum", Le Musée Condé, n° 61, December 2004, pp. 35-56; "Theory on the transport procedure of the Raft of Medusa  employed by the merchant Rey", La Méduse, n° 12, December 2003, pp. 2-4; "The Parisian industry of prepared canvas' in the first half of the 19th century: connections between science, art and technique", Cahiers François Viète, n° 6, 2003, pp. 81-102.

 

Mark McDonald
Mark McDonald is Curator of Old Master prints and Spanish drawings at the British Museum. His research interest include sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish art, and European printmaking during the Renaissance. His recent publication The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus 1488-1539: a Renaissance collector in Seville was awarded the Mitchell Prize for Art History, the Eleanor Tufts Award for Hispanic studies in 2006, and named the Book of the Year by Apollo in 2004. His current and future research interests include Italian Chiaroscuro prints, the print collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo, Goya and Spanish drawings.

Antigoni Memou
Antigoni Memou is a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She is currently completing her PhD thesis, entitled From the Globalisation of the Movement (1968) to the Movement Against Globalisation (2001): Social Movements, Photography, Representation in the Late Twentieth Century. Her research focuses on the circulation of photographs of these movements in established institutions, mainstream mass media and the movements themselves and examines the function of photography in a complex system of transmission of political ideas. Her broader research interests include contemporary art, history and theory of photography, the relationship of aesthetics to politics, and more specifically issues of globalisation, alternative media and Internet activism.

Charles Miller
Charlie Miller is Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld, from which he received his PhD in 2006 for The Ambivalent Eye: Picasso 1925-1933. From 2005 to 2007 he was research fellow at the AHRC Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies, University of Essex. He published three pieces, 'Apocalypse', 'Archaeology' and 'Pablo Picasso', in Ades and Baker, eds., Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS (Hayward Gallery and MIT Press, 2006), winner of the Art Newspaper & AXA Art Exhibition Catalogue Award. He is editor of 'The Use-Value of Documents', a special issue of the Papers of Surrealism (Autumn 2007), to which he has contributed a critical 'Introduction', an article entitled 'Bataille with Picasso: Crucifixion and Apocalypse', and a translation of an essay by Georges Didi-Huberman. His general research areas are the production and reception of Picasso, and the history and theory of the avant-garde. He is working on articles and a book about Picasso and surrealism. A second book project concerns avant-garde (ab)uses of history.

 

John Milner
John Milner is Professor Emeritus at Newcastle University. His current research activities include:
1. The interaction of Russian Futurists and Italian Futurists. Russian Futurist writers and painters responded immediately to Italian futurist manifestos, and to works seen, and heard, in Paris and in Italy. Yet at the same time they were eager to assert their own distinctive interests, priorities, and independent identity. The result is a rich relationship and critique that in Russia contributed to the development of Revolutionary futurism and to quite different collaborations among émigré futurists outside Russia. This research will be manifest as an exhibition at the Estorick Collection, London, scheduled for March 2007.
2. Research into the origins of Museums of Modern Art, especially in Europe. This has been supported by Leverhulme research leave and associated travel has been supported by the British Academy.
3. Critical Essay on artists' texts aimed at effecting social change in the period 1870 - 1917.

Alexandra Moschovi
Dr Alexandra Moschovi's research has concentrated on the institutionalisation of photography in the 1980s and 1990s, exploring how its belated accommodation in the modern/contemporary art museum ushered in an ontological reassessment not only of its properties as a fine art practice, but also of the museum's foundational values. Her research interests also include British and American cultural policies and issues relating to contemporary politics of representation. Recent curatorial projects have focused on the fusion of the private into the public and the changing morpheme of the post-industrial landscape in contemporary photographic practice. She is currently working on the recontextualisation of nineteenth-century photographs in various institutions, examining their collecting and taxonomic biography and how their use and exhibition value has changed.

Satish Padiyar
Satish Padiyar's interest is in the interrelations between art and the body, self, sexuality and philosophy. His research has focussed these concerns on the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century art of Jacques-Louis David and Antonio Canova. Specifically, he attempts to read David's painting in relation to contemporary post-structuralist theories of the subject and sexuality (for example, the philosophical work of Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler); as well as in relation to recent queer and gay methodologies (therefore reading the historical archive for its silences and constitutive exclusions). The result of this is a book, published in 2007, Chains. David, Canova and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France. Currently, he is engaged on two projects: a monograph on the complex early-nineteenth century sculptural practice of Antonio Canova; and a study of history painting, self and philosophical notions of freedom from Courbet to Picasso.
Publications:
'Crisis? What Crisis?', Art History, Vol. 21, No. 2, June 1998.
'The Luminous Body', Portfolio. The Catalogue of contemporary photography in Britain, No. 32, December 2000.
The Triumph of Eros. Art and Seduction in 18th-century France, an exhibition co-curated with Dimitri Ozerkof, Fontanka, 2006.
Chains. David, Canova and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France (Penn State Press, 2007).
'Shadow of Agency: Derrida, Marx, David', in As Radical as Reality Itself. Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century, eds. Beaumont, Hemingway, Leslie and Roberts (Peter Lang, 2007).
'Dispossessed. On Late David', in David after David. Essays on the Later Work, ed. Ledbury, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press, 2007.

 

Gavin Parkinson
Gavin Parkinson completed his PhD at the Courtauld in 2000 and taught subsequently at the Courtauld, Birkbeck College, and the University of Oxford. He specialises in Surrealist art and thought, the interfaces between art and science, and questions of interpretation in art history with particular reference to Marcel Duchamp and Postmodernism. He has published essays, articles, and book reviews on Surrealism and modern physics, Marcel Duchamp, and Adolf Wölfli. In 2008, he will publish three books: Surrealism, Art, and Modern Science with Yale University Press; The Duchamp Book with Tate Publishing; and a collection of his writings on aspects of Surrealism for Oneworld Publications. He is currently at work on a project that goes under the onerous title, Metafictional Historiography of Art.

Edward Payne
Edward Payne is a third-year PhD student and Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld. His research focuses on seventeenth-century Spanish and Neapolitan painting, prints and drawings, with particular reference to the works of Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652). He is currently writing his doctoral thesis on violence and corporality in the art of Ribera, and organising with Scott Nethersole a symposium entitled Histories of Violence: Italy and the Mediterranean c.1300-1700. Additionally, Edward is working with Dr Zahira Véliz on a catalogue raisonné of Spanish drawings from the Courtauld collection, and he has submitted an article to immediations which examines an intriguing caricature by Pier Francesco Mola (1612-66), also located in the Courtauld Gallery.

Andreas Puth
Andreas Puth is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld, teaching English and French Gothic architecture. He is interested in medieval architecture across Europe and has investigated fourteenth-century buildings in the Holy Roman Empire as settings for public imagery in urban contexts. Two articles on representations of the emperor and the seven electors on the trade hall in Mainz and the ruler imagery of Emperor Charles IV on the main parish church at Muhlhausen are in the press. Currently, he is completing his PhD thesis, Imitatio Caroli, Imitatio Rudolphi? Reconsidering Habsburg dynastic representation c. 1360 to c. 1490. This looks at the visual strategies employed in various media by a "new" dynasty in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Central Europe in order to foster an own identity and to advance its political ambitions. The thesis attempts to locate Habsburg ruler imagery in a pan-European context, employing methodological revisions such as the questioning of the concept of 'court art' not yet sufficiently applied to Central European ruler patronage, and challenging the art-historical model of imitatio which has traditionally focused on the model allegedly provided for the Habsburgs by Charles IV and the court art and architecture he inspired in Prague. Publication of a conference paper on these issues is also forthcoming. 

Elisabeth Reissner
As the first Caroline Villers Research Fellow Elisabeth Reissner will be studying Cézanne from the perspective of technical art history. She will be investigating the materials and techniques and historical context of the nine Cézanne works in the Courtauld Collections. This will include the ways in which he constructed his images. She will be collaborating with the National Gallery, so that inclusion in the project of their Cézannes will ensure a comprehensive range of his works in the study. The study will both situate Cézanne within, and contribute to, the growing body of research into the studio practice, materials and techniques in the second half of the 19th century in France. 

 

Clare Richardson
Clare Richardson is a Paul Mellon fellow in the Department of Conservation and Technology. Over the past three years Clare has focused on the work of Victorian painters, exploring their methods and materials, with a particular focus on the work of Rebecca Orpen, a prolific amateur painter. Through an ongoing collaboration with the National Trust, Clare has examined the large collection of Rebecca's paintings in the collection of Baddesley Clinton house. Clare is now exploring the work of William Etty RA, examining paintings from Anglesey Abbey (National Trust), and collaborating with colleagues at Tate and Manchester Art Gallery.

Kate Stonor
Kate Stonor is a conservator with a special interest in the technical study of paintings with a view to illuminating artistic practice. Her current research is based on British paintings in the Courtauld Gallery Collection and she is undertaking studies on both modern painters, such as Walter Richard Sickert, and Stuart painters, including Sir Peter Lely. Along with her colleague, Clare Richardson, Kate is hoping to create an online database of colourmen's stamps. This would aid both conservators and art historians to identify the markings left by artists' suppliers on the reverse of paintings and give a specific date range for the production of the support. It is hoped that this database would build into a large reference collection, allowing people to search by artist or artistic group to look at patterns of use for types of support and artists' supplier.

 

Achim Timmermann
Achim Timmermann (PhD, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1996) is Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as well as the current Kress Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London, and specializes in late medieval art and architecture of northern and central Europe. His scholarly interests include Gothic architecture, the visual culture of the eucharist, and the representation of Christian-Jewish relationships in medieval art. His most recent publications have focused on didactic and moralizing imagery, and the role of monuments and images in the performance of late medieval and early modern rituals of criminal punishment.

 

Zahira Véliz
Zahira Véliz has published frequently on the subject of Spanish drawings, especially the work of Alonso Cano. She has organised exhibitions at the Museo del Prado, Madrid and at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, Oviedo, Spain. In 2006 she organised a Wallace Collection exhibition focusing on Lady with a Fan by Velázquez, together with the variant from Chatsworth. Trained originally as an art conservator, she has contributed many articles to the literature of technical art history, and in 1986 she published Artists’ Treatises in Golden Age Spain (Cambridge University Press).  She has written numerous articles and lectured widely on Spanish art in the early modern era, and, as a member of the Centro de Estudios de Europa Hispánica (Madrid) is currently cataloguing the Spanish drawings in the collection of the Courtauld Institute, and working on the reconstruction of William Stirling-Maxwell’s drawings collection. 

Rose Walker
Rose Walker is a specialist in medieval Spanish art. She is currently working on a project that focuses on the interaction between culture and landscape. The British Academy is funding four field trips that constitute the first phase of this project. Each trip takes one of the principal Roman roads that crossed the Iberian peninsula and seeks alternative narratives to 'the pilgrimage route' and 'the re-conquest'.  These narratives are revealed through diversions, detours and changes of direction that together demonstrate a new sense of belonging amongst the people who settled and built on new and old sites. A photographic record of the routes and of the art and architecture that defined them is an important part of the project.

Giles Waterfield

Giles Waterfield is an independent curator and writer, Associate Scholar at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Director of Royal Collection Studies. He taught the Courtauld's M.A. in the History and Theory of The Art Museum, and has worked as Head of Education at the Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums and as Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery from 1979 to 1996.  He was joint curator of the exhibition Art Treasures of England at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1998, In Celebration: The Art of the Country House at the Tate Gallery in 1998 and Below Stairs, National Portrait Galleries, London and Edinburgh, in 2003-4.  He is an authority on the history of museums and his publications include: Palaces of Art, Art for the People and Soane and Death, as well as three novels. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, a Vice-President of NADFAS and Trustee of Charleston, Sussex.

 

Rachel Wells
Rachel Wells is a Henry Moore Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. She is currently extending her PhD thesis on scale in contemporary sculpture in order to publish this research. Evaluating the relationship between Postmodernism and the trend of enlargements, miniaturisations and life-size sculptures made since the 1990s, the research also encompasses the photographic reproduction of this work.

 

 

Academic Year 2006-07

 

Elizabeth Bartman
Elizabeth Bartman is a specialist in Greek and Roman art. She is presently working on two major projects: a study of ethnic identity in Roman portraiture (supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities) and of the "ideal" sculpture – images of gods, mythic figures, personifications, etc. as opposed to historical personages – collected by Henry Blundell in the late eighteenth century for his estate at Ince outside Liverpool. The largest private collection ever assembled in Britain, Blundell's statues present a cross-section of Roman decorative sculpture; heavily restored, they are as much a reflection of eighteenth-century art as of ancient. Working with this material has led Elizabeth Bartman into new areas of research such as the Grand Tour, collecting, and the reception of the antique.

 

Lee Beard
Lee Beard is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. He completed his PhD, entitled “Modernist Cell” or “Gentle Nest”; Ben Nicholson, Art, Design and the Modern Interior 1924-1939, at the Courtauld in 2003. His current research is a development of themes originating from this project, in particular those concerned with the relationship between modern art and the domestic interior in Britain during the early to mid- twentieth century. Focusing on the period 1919-1959, and working under the title ‘Living with Modernism’, his aim is to evaluate the many ideologies and strategies that have informed and shaped the interaction between art and notions domesticity in modernist production and display.

James Boaden

James Boaden's PhD research engages with questions of nostalgia and the pastoral genre in collage, assembled sculpture and experimental film in 1950s America. James has published articles on the subject in the Courtauld Institute's scholarly journal immediations as well as the on-line journal of the AHRC Centre for Surrealism and its Legacies: Papers of Surrealism. James has also conducted freelance curatorial work for the exhibition 'Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933-1957' (Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, 2005) and for the screenings entitled 'Lights Up: American Structural Film' at the National Film Theatre, London in 2006.

 

Peter Dent
Peter Dent is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow.  He is currently working on a project entitled 'Sculpture and the Senses in Late Medieval Italy'. This will concentrate on the strategies that Italian sculptors employed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in order to communicate a sense of 'presence'. Beyond the immediate historical contexts for this enquiry, he is also exploring how developments during this period may relate to the long running theoretical debate about the nature of sculpture, in particular its ability to stimulate the sense of touch, in contrast to painting, which is primarily concerned with sight.
This interest grew out of research conducted for his PhD, The Body of Christ in Fourteenth-Century Tuscan Sculpture, undertaken at the Courtauld Institute of Art and completed in 2005. More generally, he is interested in the relationships between sculpture and painting.

 

Caroline Elam
Caroline Elam’s research interests include many areas of Italian renaissance art, architecture and urbanism, as well as the history of  art history and criticism since the mid nineteenth century. She is currently completing a book on Roger Fry and Italian Art for Yale University Press, and writing a chapter on ‘Art in Lorenzo de’ Magnifico’s Florence’ for a volume on Renaissance Florence to be published by Cambridge University Press. She has recently co-curated and edited the catalogue of an exhibition on Michelangelo’s architectural drawings for the Centro Palladiano in Vicenza (closing 10 December 2006) which will move to the Casa Buonarroti, Florence, from 15 December to 19 March 2007. Her next project is a book to be called The Urban Face of Renaissance Florence. 

 

Kathryn Gerry
Kathryn Gerry is working towards a doctoral degree in the history of art department at Johns Hopkins University, supervised by Dr Herbert Kessler.  She currently holds a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Kress Foundation, and is conducting research at the Courtauld Institute.  Her doctoral research concerns the Alexis Quire, a portion of the St Albans Psalter; in her thesis she will address questions as to the original production and function of this quire, before it was joined to the rest of the St Albans Psalter. In addition to her work with manuscripts, Kate's earlier projects have focused on portable arts in the Byzantine Empire, stained glass in France and England, and medieval European pilgrimage.

 

Matthew Hunter
Matthew Hunter is presently a Whiting Foundation Fellow at the Courtauld Institute, through which he is researching and writing a dissertation on the cultures of visualisation in the early Royal Society of London. Tentatively entitled Robert Hooke Fecit: Making and Knowing in Restoration London, his project focuses upon the activities of the late seventeenth-century polymathic experimentalist Robert Hooke, with particular interest in his inter-related practices of drawing, collecting and building. Having trained in the visual arts himself, Matthew Hunter’s research interests more generally include interfaces of art and science and inter-disciplinary approaches to problems of representation.

 

Jill Lloyd
Jill Lloyd is a specialist in early 20th-century German and Austrian art. Her book German Expressionism, Primitivism and Modernity was published by Yale University Press in 1991 and awarded the National Art Book Prize. She is currently working on two research projects. First, an in depth study of Vincent Van Gogh's influence on German and Austrian Expressionism which will result in an exhibition (at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and Neue Galerie, New York) and two scholarly publications. Her biography of the Austrian émigré artist, Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, which is based on extensive archive research, will be published by Yale University Press in 2007. When these two projects come to fruition, Jill Lloyd will begin research on the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler in preparation for an exhibition in 2008.

 

Anna Lovatt
Anna Lovatt recently completed her PhD, entitled Seriality and Systematic Drawing circa 1966-1976, at the Courtauld Institute. Her current research, funded by the Henry Moore Foundation, considers the importance of drawing in New York based sculptural practices of the late 1960s and early 70s. Broader research interests include post-war American art and the relevance of systems and communication theory to post-Minimal and Conceptual practices.

Mark McDonald
Mark McDonald is Curator of Old Master prints and Spanish drawings at the British Museum. His research interest include sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish art, and European printmaking during the Renaissance. His recent publication The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus 1488-1539: a Renaissance collector in Seville was awarded Book of the Year by Apollo in 2004 and the Eleanor Tufts Award for Hispanic studies in 2006. His current and future research interests include Italian Chiaroscuro prints, the print collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo, Goya and Spanish drawings.

 

John Milner
John Milner is Professor Emeritus at Newcastle University. His current research activities include:
1. The interaction of Russian Futurists and Italian Futurists. Russian Futurist writers and painters responded immediately to Italian futurist manifestos, and to works seen, and heard, in Paris and in Italy. Yet at the same time they were eager to assert their own distinctive interests, priorities, and independent identity. The result is a rich relationship and critique that in Russia contributed to the development of Revolutionary futurism and to quite different collaborations among émigré futurists outside Russia. This research will be manifest as an exhibition at the Estorick Collection, London, scheduled for March 2007.
2. Research into the origins of Museums of Modern Art, especially in Europe. This has been supported by Leverhulme research leave and associated travel has been supported by the British Academy.
3. Critical Essay on artists' texts aimed at effecting social change in the period 1870 - 1917.

 

Alexandra Moschovi
Dr Alexandra Moschovi’s research has concentrated on the institutionalisation of photography in the 1980s and 1990s, exploring how its belated accommodation in the modern/contemporary art museum ushered in an ontological reassessment not only of its properties as a fine art practice, but also of the museum’s foundational values. Her research interests also include British and American cultural policies and issues relating to contemporary politics of representation. Recent curatorial projects have focused on the fusion of the private into the public and the changing morpheme of the post-industrial landscape in contemporary photographic practice. She is currently working on the recontextualisation of nineteenth-century photographs in various institutions, examining their collecting and taxonomic biography and how their use and exhibition value has changed.

 

Satish Padiyar
Satish Padiyar’s interest is in the interrelations between the body, self, sexuality and philosophy in late eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth century French neoclassical art. His research has focused these concerns on the art of Jacques-Louis David. Specifically, he attempts to read David’s painting in relation to contemporary post-structuralist theories of the subject and sexuality (for example, the philosophical work of Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler); as well as in relation to recent queer and gay methodologies (reading the historical archive, therefore, for its silences and constitutive exclusions). The result of this is a book, Chains. Jacques-Louis David and the Post-Revolutionary Subject, which is to be published by Pennsylvania State University Press in early 2006. Currently, Satish is engaged on three projects: he is researching a paper on David’s early 1787 Death of Socrates, which enquires into the difficult relationship between Socratic ‘care of the self’ and (homo)sexual subjectivity, as they it is articulated for a French ‘enlightened’ audience; he is working on notions of selfhood, desire, amnesia and exile, as they are raised by David’s post-Brussels (post-1815) profoundly ‘de-centred’ art practice; and he is engaged in research into the complex early nineteenth-century sculptural practice of David’s contemporary, Antonio Canova, with a view to producing a monograph on that artist.
Publications:
‘Crisis? What Crisis?, Art History, Vol. 21, No. 2, June 1998.
‘Sade/ David’, Art History, Vol. 23, No. 3, September 2000.
`The Luminous Body’, Portfolio. The catalogue of contemporary photography in Britain, No. 32, December 2000.
Chains. Jacques-Louis David and the Post-Revolutionary Subject (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).
`Shadow of Agency: Derrida, Marx, David’ (forthcoming)

 

Elisabeth Reissner
As the first Caroline Villers Research Fellow Elisabeth Reissner will be studying Cézanne from the perspective of technical art history. She will be investigating the materials and techniques and historical context of the nine Cézanne works in the Courtauld Collections. This will include the ways in which he constructed his images. She will be collaborating with the National Gallery, so that inclusion in the project of their Cézannes will ensure a comprehensive range of his works in the study. The study will both situate Cézanne within, and contribute to, the growing body of research into the studio practice, materials and techniques in the second half of the 19th century in France. 

 

Jessica Richardson
Jessica Richardson’s current work (thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art) focuses on the cult and iconography of St Leonard of Noblat (the French, sixth-century patron saint of prisoners) in medieval and early renaissance Italy. St Leonard gained wide popularity in the whole of Italy (and throughout Europe) in the twelfth century and continued to be the focus of an intense devotion. Her research has shown that he was deemed an appropriate saint for the various religious orders (monastic, military and mendicant). She is primarily interested in the creation and recreation of the image of the saint and its reception at specific centres in Italy, which include Venice, Florence, Prato, Lucca, Siena, Assisi, Rome, Foggia (Apulia) and Sessa Aurunca (Campania). A key issue addressed in her work is how the various images of the saint reveal different aspects of his cult: How did the cult of an ‘early’ and ‘foreign’ saint survive and adapt to the changes that were occurring in late medieval sanctity? It what ways do the representations of the saint provide us with information on new demands placed by both institutions and individuals? More generally, her research interests include the ways in which images of saints are used to promote cults and maintain traditions; the significance of dress in images of holy figures; the relationship between representations of saints and other available primary evidence for their cults (e.g., written lives, relics and site dedications); the creation and maintenance of sacred space and the various motivations behind the depictions of saints in medieval and renaissance Europe.

 

Kate Stonor

Kate Stonor is a conservator with a special interest in the technical study of paintings with a view to illuminating artistic practice. Her current research is based on British paintings in the Courtauld Gallery Collection and she is undertaking studies on both modern painters, such as Walter Richard Sickert, and Stuart painters, including Sir Peter Lely. Along with her colleague, Clare Richardson, Kate is hoping to create an online database of colourmen’s stamps. This would aid both conservators and art historians to identify the markings left by artists’ suppliers on the reverse of paintings and give a specific date range for the production of the support. It is hoped that this database would build into a large reference collection, allowing people to search by artist or artistic group to look at patterns of use for types of support and artists’ supplier.

 

Tomoko Uno
Dr Tomoko Uno of the Japan Center for International Cooperation in Conservation, National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, will be a Temporary Associate Scholar of the Research Forum from 6 November to 1 December 2006. Dr Uno is a specialist in diagnostic enviornmental monitoring, with current projects on the conservation of the wall paintings in Bamiyan (Afghanistan) and Dunhuang (China). She will be undertaking research on the methodology employed by the Conservation of Wall Painting Department, and visiting institutes and sites in England where environmental assessment is ongoing.