Research Forum
Associate Scholars
The Associate Scholars group is made up of, predominantly, early-career researchers based at The Courtauld in conjunction with distinguished Visiting Professors. Postdoctoral Fellows working on a range of topics and Visiting Lecturers and Visiting Professors teaching courses at The Courtauld form the core membership of this group. The Associate Scholars meet at least once a term giving an opportunity for the members to offer presentations and share knowledge about their research.
The 2012-13 Associate Scholars are listed below.
Jocelyn Anderson
Jocelyn Anderson is a teaching assistant and visiting lecturer in 2012-13. She is currently researching country-house guidebooks in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for her PhD with Christine Stevenson; for this work, she has received grants from the Yale Center for British Art and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. In addition to teaching neoclassical architecture and design at the Courtauld, she is an assistant editor of Architectural History.
charlotte ashby
Charlotte
was awarded her PhD in 2007 by the University of St Andrews for a thesis examining the intersection of nationalist and modernist aspirations in turn-of-the-century Finnish architecture. She went on to hold the post of Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Viennese Café Project at the Royal College of Art. She is editor and contributor to a forthcoming collection of essays: The Viennese Café and fin-de-siecle Culture, Berghahn 2013. Other recent publications include ‘Nation-building and Design: Finnish Textiles and the work of the Friends of Finnish Handicrafts', Journal of Design History, 23:4, 2010; pp. 351-365.
Thomas Balfe
Meredith A. Brown
Meredith A. Brown holds a BA in studio art and art history from Stanford University (2003) and an MA (2007) and PhD (2012) in art history from The Courtauld. Her doctoral research, supervised by Professor Mignon Nixon, explored the ways in which A.I.R. Gallery, the first women's cooperative gallery in the United States, used feminist and other activist strategies to become the leading institutional space for women artists in the 1970s. Meredith has taught at The Courtauld, Stanford University, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; lectured and published widely; and curated exhibitions of contemporary art at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Centre for Visual Arts at Stanford and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a cooperative gallery in Philadelphia. Her research interests include the intersection of feminist politics and pedagogy, representations of labour and bureaucracy, and artistic collaboration in postwar art and art institutions. She is currently the 2013 Andrew W. Mellon Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow (Activities Coordinator) at The Courtauld. Her project there examines various aspects of collaboration and collectivity and their influence on both the production of art and the writing of its histories.
For more information, see her profile page.
Amy Bubb
Amy is studying for the MA History of Art with Scott Nethersole, 'The Arts of Florence and Central Italy, 1400-1500' and is due to graduate in July. Her dissertation is on Nanni di Banco's sculpture at Orsanmichele in Florence. She completed her BA History of Art at the Courtauld, writing her dissertation on the representation of women in the photography of Man Ray and Robert Mapplethorpe. She is a contributor to the Views and Reviews blog, as well as an Arts writer for the Courtauld Reviews magazine, the London Student newspaper and HI! Magazine.
ELEni Dimitriadou
Kerry Doran
Kerry Doran is an MA History of Art candidate, studying contemporary art with Professor Julian Stallabrass. She specializes in new media art and the way in which contemporary practices are informed by digital culture. In 2012, she graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder, summa cum laude and with distinction, in art history, studio arts, and anthropology. Kerry also writes exhibition reviews for the London Student.
Katie Faulkner
Katie Faulkner has recently completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She specialises in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British sculpture and its relationship with visual and popular culture. She is a visiting lecturer on the MA course, The Aesthetic Body: Science, Aestheticism and the image of the Body in British Art and also teaches an undergraduate course on modern sculpture in London. Katie is also a public programmes educator at the Courtauld Gallery and currently edits the Courtauld postgraduate journal immediations.
caroline fowler
christine gardner
pia gottschaller
Pia Gottschaller took a BA in art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and trained at The Courtauld Institute of Art to become a painting conservator (Dip 1997), then worked at the Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, and at The Menil Collection, Houston, where she participated in the conservation of the Rothko Chapel murals. She received her PhD in 2003 from Technische Universität Munich for a thesis on the artistic process of Blinky Palermo. Subsequently, she worked as Associate Conservator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, followed by a Postdoc Research Fellowship at Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte in Rome, and the position of Assistant Fine Arts Director at German Academy Villa Massimo, Rome. Her research interests focus on issues of technical art history, in particular with regard to postwar and contemporary European and American artistic practices.
Kate Grandjouan
Kate Grandjouan completed her doctoral thesis Close Encounters: French Identities in English Graphic Satire c1730-1790 in December 2009. She was awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in March 2010 and is now revising the manuscript for publication. Current research interests include visual and textual representations of the French, print cultures; national satire; theories of humour and cross-channel circulation and exchange. Kate has been a visiting lecturer at the Courtauld Institute since January 2011. Last year she taught two new courses on the eighteenth century (Reading Hogarth and Graphic Satire in Britain 1680-1790). In 2011-12 she is teaching Reading Hogarth and collaborating on a new MA course entitled Sets and Series in Early Modern Painting.
Chris Green
Sarah Guérin
Sarah Guérin received her PhD from the University of Toronto in July 2009 for a dissertation entitled ‘Tears of Compunction’: French Gothic Ivories in Devotional Practice. Prior to arriving at the Courtauld, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, and also held the Hanns Swarzenski and Brigitte Horney Swarzenski Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An expert in medieval ivories and associated with the Gothic Ivories Project, Sarah’s publications have appeared in the Journal of Medieval History and West 86th. While at the Courtauld, in addition to teaching courses on medieval art, Sarah is working on a number of projects, including a book manuscript entitled Ivory Palaces: Gothic Sculptures at Church and Court and a catalogue for the Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon.
milena 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 2009, where she also undertook a two-year post-doctoral fellowship. She is a visiting lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art and Head of Art History at Morley College. 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 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In 2012-13 she is teaching a course on
Power, Piety and Prestige: Art at the Courts of France c. 1340-1420.
sue jones
eric jorink
cadence kinsey
sara knelman
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.
For more information, see her profile page.
Megan N. Liberty
Megan N. Liberty is currently a candidate for an MA in History of Art, studying British Modernism with Lisa Tickner. She graduated Cum Lade with honours from Dickinson College in 2011 with a Bachelor of Arts in English and a minor in Art History. Her research interests are 20th century prints and illustrated books and the relationship between image and text.
vanja malloy
In spring 2013, Vanja Malloy is teaching Beyond Black: Contemporary Art in Britain Now. She is currently completing a doctoral thesis with Gavin Parkinson titled: 'Rethinking Alexander Calder: Astronomy, Modern Physics, Postmodernism and Play'.
william mcmanus
William McManus has done graduate studies in art history at Johns Hopkins and Princeton Universities. His dissertation at Princeton deals with the art and films of Andy Warhol (ca. 1961-68). His is the first full length study to take Warhol’s painting, media projects and films together as an organic whole, and to place Warhol’s project within a social and psychoanalytic context of the neoliberal aesthetics that emerged from this moment. Prior to arriving at the Courtauld, McManus taught lecture and seminar courses at Vassar College, Stanford University and the Rhode Island School of Design, both in the departments of art and of media studies and the humanities centres more generally. His current research, loosely titled ‘Inside Postmodernism’ focuses on performance and projected works of the 1970s as they elaborate new models of historical experience. McManus has most recently given public lectures on these subjects at the Freie Universität Berlin, and at The Courtauld. His writing has appeared in the Art Journal and the Brooklyn Rail; an essay on Warhol’s painting and commodity relations is forthcoming in the journal Amerikastudien.
alister mill
John Milner
Natalia Murray
Natalia Murray was born in St Petersburg where she read Art History for five years at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1998 she completed her doctoral thesis on C18th English Mezzotint Engravings at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Her interest in the Russian Avant-Garde was always there, but was brought to the surface when she met the grand-daughter of one of the most influential Russian art critics of the early C20th, Nikolay Punin, and began to write a book about him and his struggle to keep Avant-Garde art alive in Russia after the Revolution. Natalia’s biography of Nikolay Punin, ‘The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde. The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin (1888-1953)’, was published by Brill Academic Publishers in June 2012. At present Natalia is writing her second PhD thesis, at the Courtauld, on the development of proletarian art in Russia after the 1917 Revolution, and its various forms of expression in the street decorations of Petrograd.
Ashitha Nagesh
Ashitha is a journalist for art magazines, including Artforum, Modern Matter, Kilimanjaro and One Stop Arts. She is also completing her MA in History of Art at Courtauld Institute of Art, specialising in Medieval Art under Prof. John Lowden. She graduated with a BA in English Literature from King’s College, London. She now lives and works in London, but has also worked for short periods in New York and Bangalore, India.
Katrin Seyler
Katrin Seyler received her PhD in History of Art from The University of Birmingham in July 2012. Her AHRC-funded doctoral research explored how early-modern journeymen image-makers acquired and organized knowledge. From this research, the concept of a "Republic of Tools" emerged as a framework for the analysis of non-scholarly traditions of thought which shaped the pan-European artisan community of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Andrew W. Mellon Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow for 2013, Katrin is developing the idea of the "Republic of Tools" by investigating how it was affected by crises and trauma, such as war, revolution and internal conflicts. At The Courtauld, Katrin is also teaching a second-year course on the evaluation of texts composed by early-modern artists, and supports the Andrew W. Mellon-funded M.A. "Visualising Knowledge in the Early Modern Netherlands".
mellie naydenova-slade
Mellie Naydenova-Slade is a visiting lecturer at the Courtauld. In the spring 2013 term she will be teaching a CGDHA course entitled Patronage, Making and Meaning: The Gothic Image in England, c. 1200-1530.
Lisa Tickner
Lisa Tickner is a Visiting Professor at The Courtauld. Her current research interests include the London art world in the 1960s, British art c.1880-1980, and contemporary women artists. She teaches the Courtauld MA on
Modernism in Britain 1890-1970.
For more information, see her profile page.
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.
ursula weekes
Ursula Weekes was formerly Supervisor of the Print Room at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. She gained her PhD in 2002 from the Courtauld Institute of Art (published as 'Early Engravers and their Public' by Brepols/Harvey Miller, 2004). From 2004 to 2010 she was based in Delhi as a Postdoctoral Commonwealth Fellow at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, and she also taught on Mughal and Renaissance art for the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is now in London, completing her book on 'The Great Mughals and the Art of Europe'. Last year she taught a new BA Special Option course for the Courtauld on "Mughal Painting c.1550-1748".
Iris Wien
After studies in Architecture and Urban planning at the Technical University Stuttgart Iris Wien studied Art history, Philosophy and Sociology in Bonn, Bochum and Berlin. She received her PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation entitled Joshua Reynolds: Mythos und Metapher (Munich : Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2009). She was predoctoral fellow of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. Her work was also supported by research grants from the Freie Universität Berlin and the DAAD Bonn. From 2006 to 2012 she held a position as Assistant Professor at the Art Historical Department of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt. She has published on British Art of the eighteenth and nineteenth century as well as on contemporary art. Her publications include „Transparenz der Unschuld. Ein Blick auf englische Kinderbildnisse des 18. Jahrhunderts“, in: Die Entdeckung der Kindheit: das englische Kinderporträt und seine europäische Nachfolge / exh. cat. Städel Museum, 20. Apr. – 15. July 2007, ed. by Mirjam Neumeister, Köln : Dumont, 2007, and “Naturalising tradition: why learning from the masters?”, in: Learning from the Masters: The teaching of Art History in Art Schools, from the eighteenth century to the present, ed. by Matthew Potter, Farnham : Ashgate (forthcoming). While at the Courtauld she is working on her project “The Elements of Drawing: Reflections on the status of graphic marks in visual theory in 19th-century England” and preparing a book publication about “Art Criticism in the light of the Exhibition Culture in 19th Century London”.
Catherine Yvard
Catherine Yvard completed a degree in sociology and political science in France before turning to art history at Trinity College, Dublin where she completed a PhD in 2005, focusing on a late 15th-century French book of hours (Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, ms. 89) and including a hitherto-unpublished Catalogue of Manuscript Books of Hours in Irish Public Libraries. She has worked on digitisation projects at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the British Library in London, cataloguing medieval illuminated manuscripts. She currently teaches courses on illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages at Morley College, London, and has taught on this topic at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and at the Courtauld Institute of Art (Summer School).
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 has been seeing quite a few lately.