Research Forum
Fellows
CAROLINE VILLERS RESEARCH FELLOW IN CONSERVATION, 2012
Jim Harris completed his PhD, Donatello's Polychromed Sculpture: Case Sudies in Materials and Meaning, at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2010 under the supervision of Professor Patricia Rubin. He is currently working on a series of articles based on the three principal objects of his thesis; Donatello's Bardi Crucifix, Cavalcanti Annunciation and Padua Entombment. Jim's ongoing research concerns sculptural polychromy as a record of the traumatic events of the English 'Long Reformation'. He is also a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld and has taught at King's, Birkbeck and the IGRS.
Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow (Mellon M.A.), 2011-12
Monia Abdallah
Monia Abdallah received her doctorate from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in December 2009 with a dissertation entitled Constructing the Continuous Progress of the Past: an inquiry into the notion of ‘Contemporary Islamic Art’ (1970-2009). Before coming to the Courtauld, she was Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) . Over the course of 2011-12, in addition to pursuing her own research, Dr Abdallah will be teaching a BA course and working with Professors Mignon Nixon and Juliet Mitchell on the Research Forum/Mellon Foundation M.A. course, which this year is: Art And Psychoanalysis: Fifty Years Of War In The Time Of Peace, 1960-2010.
terra foundation for american art teaching fellow, 2011-12
Elisa Schaar
Elisa Schaar received her BA in Philosophy from Harvard University (2004) and her MSt and DPhil in Art History from Oxford University (2005 and 2010). Before coming to the Courtauld, she was Visiting Lecturer at the University of Warwick in the academic year 2010-11. Ongoing research interests include pop, the European reception of American pop in a Cold War context, pop's politically-inflected European variants, and the legacy of pop in the 1980s and the present global situation. On the occasion of the 'Warhol: Headlines Exhibition', Elisa is co-organizing a Terra Foundation international symposium on 'American Art and the Mass Media' that will take place at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA) in Paris in May 2012. Her article 'Spinoza in Vegas, Sturtevant Everywhere: A Case of Critical (Re-)Discoveries and Artistic Self-Reinventions' appeared in Art History in December 2010. Among her publication projects is a fuller study of Sturtevant's multifaceted practice of repetition. At the Courtauld this year, Elisa teaches a BA third-year course on pop and the contested status of mass culture. A forthcoming Leverhulme research project (Early Career Fellowship) will explore sound and the durational experience in art since the 1960s.
Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow (ACTIVITIES COORDINATOR), 2012
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.
Social Sciences and humanities research council of canada fellow
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.