Visiting Professors

 

2011-12

Carlo Ginzburg is among the most distinguished of historians, celebrated for his pioneering work forging cohesive social and cultural histories from the application of disparate but complementary disciplines to precise contexts. Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles and the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, he has also taught and held fellowships at, among others, the University of Bologna, the Warburg Institute, Princeton, Yale and Columbia Universities and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Aby Warburg Prize (1992), the Humboldt-Forschungspreis (2007) and the Balzan Prize for the History of Europe, 1400-1700 (2010). His many books, translated into more than 20 languages, include: The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller (1980); The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1983) ; The Enigma of Piero della Francesca (1985); Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (1989); Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1991); Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (1998): The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice (1999); History, Rhetoric, and Proof (1999); No Island is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective (2000).

 

 

Bronwen Wilson received her PhD in Art History from Northwestern University in 1999 and is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. Following a Postdoctoral Fellowship at UBC in 1999-2000, she taught at McGill University from 2000-2007 before returning to Vancouver to take up her present post. In 2003-4 Bronwen Wilson was a Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, subsequent to which she published her first book, The World in Venice: print, the city, and early modern identity (2005), awarded the 2006 Roland H. Bainton prize for Art History. She is now preparing her second book, Facing Early Modernity: portraits, physiognomy, and naturalism in Northern Italy, for publication. Her current research ranges from the mediation of travel in the Ottoman Empire by visual representation, to the ways in which cultural representations contributed to new forms of association before the normalisation of the public sphere in the eighteenth century

 

Juliet Mitchell's pioneering work in gender and psychoanalysis has led to numerous publications, including, among many others, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (ed. with A. Oakley, 1977), Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Sibling Relationship for the Human Condition (2000) and Siblings: Sex and Violence (2003). Among her research interests are Gender differences from a psychoanalytic and social history perspective with particular reference to hysteria; an examination of the construction of the mother-and-baby couple in studies of 2nd World War and post War psychology and in particular psychoanalysis. This work revealed the importance of siblings and the neglect of a horizontal paradigm in contrast to the dominant vertical parent-child relationship of the Pre-Oedipal and Oedipus complex and more widely in the social and psychological sciences. Professor Mitchell is currently Professor of Psychoanalysis and Director of the Expanded Doctoral School in Psychoanalytic Studies at UCL Psychoanalysis Unit. She is also the Founder Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, a Research Fellow at the Department of Human Geography, University of Cambridge and Fellow Emeritus of Jesus College, University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of the British and International Psychoanalytical Societies. During 2011-12, Professor Mitchell will be teaching the Andrew W Mellon MA, Art and Psychoanalysis: fifty years of war in the time of peace, 1960-2010, alongside Professor Mignon Nixon and with the collaboration of Dr Moniah Abdallah.

 

 

2010-11

The Research Forum Visiting Professors for the academic year 2010-11 were T.J. Clark ,  Anne Wagner and Ursula Weekes.

 

T. J. Clark is one of the world’s leading authorities on the history French art of the nineteenth century and modernism, a Courtauld alumnus and Professor Emeritus of Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley.  Having visited the Courtauld in January 2011 to give a paper addressing the relationship between the space and action represented in Cézanne's Card Players, at the conference Modernist Games: Cézanne and his Card Players, Professor Clark marked his professorship with a lecture in May, The Monster PIcasso, focusing on the large painting Picasso did in 1927, Painter and Model, now in Tehran. It examined the turn in Picasso's work in the later 1920s towards an imagery of sex and violence, and, more generally, the meaning of monstrosity in his art. In particular, it asked how the new extreme imagery affected Picasso's distinctive feeling for space, and whether it led him to reconfigure the worldview that was Cubism.

 

Anne Wagner is Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley, Henry Moore Foundation Research Curator at Tate National and Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of York.  She studied at Yale and Brown Universities and received her PhD from Harvard.  Professor Wagner is the author of several books including studies of modern British sculpture, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner and Georgia O'Keefe.  Whilst at the Courtauld she lectured and gave a research seminar on Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt, considering the implications of their work, not least in terms of the challenges they level at Minimalism and the modern repackaging of time.  Professor Wagner also presented a paper to the Material Life of Things research group, discussing the Tate project to photograph the sculpture of Henry Moore.

 

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 in 2004 as Early Engravers and their Public : the Master of the Berlin Passion and manuscripts from convents in the Rhine-Maas region, ca. 1450-1500 . 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'.  Dr Weekes gave her Visiting Professor's Seminar, Art, Experience and Displaced Identities: Getting to the Heart of Why the Mughals Embraced European Art, in December 2010.

The Research Forum/Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor for the academic year 2010-11was Boris Groys of the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany . He taught the MA special option Global Conceptualism: The Last Avant-Garde or a New Beginning? in collaboration with Dr Sarah Wilson and the Research Forum/Mellon MA Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Anthony Gardner.  This MA course seeks to redefine Conceptual art as the last coherent international avant-garde movement, and as a starting point for different contemporary artistic practices. Click here for additional information on the Research Forum/Andrew W. Mellon MA.


The Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Academic Year 2010-11was Richard Meyer, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Director the Contemporary Project and the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate at the University of Southern California. 

He is the author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford University Press, 2002) and co-author of Weegee and Naked City (University of California Press, 2008). Most recently, he curated Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered at the Jewish Museum in New York City and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. His essay, “Artists Sometimes Have Feelings” received the 2008 Art Journal award from the College Art Association. He is currently completing two books, a survey text co-edited with Catherine Lord titled Art and Queer Culture, 1885-present (Phaidon, 2010) and a short history of 20th-century art titled What was Contemporary Art? to be published by MIT Press. His teaching interests include contemporary art, censorship and the public sphere, the history of photography, gender and sexuality studies, and visual culture.  As Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at The Courtauld in 2010-11, he led a series of seminars on ‘Feminist and Queer Art History’ as part of Professor Mignon Nixon's M.A. Special Option Informed: Art, Sex, War, and Gender Politics since 1960, and gave a research paper, What Was Contemporary Art?



2009-10

The Visiting Professors for the Academic Year 2008-09 were Professor Jonathan D Katz and Professor Malcolm Bull. Jonathan D Katz (Associate Professor and Chair, Visual Studies Doctoral Program, University at Buffalo; Guest Curator, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery) was the Research Forum/Terra Foundation Visiting Professor for the period 2 November to 4 December 2009. Professor Katz is a specialist on the artists of the Cold War period, has drawn attention to the dominance of queer artists in this homophobic period and has developed pioneering analyses of the iconography of codes and hidden messages in the work of artists, registering resistance to societal norms in the form of silences, chance, emptiness and coding.  He has a book forthcoming Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and the Collective Closet: How Queer Artists Came to Dominate Cold War American Art (University of Chicago Press). At the Courtauld, he will be giving a Research Seminar for the Modern and Contemporary Section,  Participatory Eros: The Art of Seductive Embodiment Before the Sexual Revolution (16 November, 17.30, Research Forum South Room).   He will be also leading a series of seminars on Eros and the 1960s for Professor Mignon Nixon’s MA Informed: Art, Sex, War, and Gender Politics since 1960.

Malcolm Bull (Ruskin School of Drawing, University of Oxford) was the Research Forum/Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor for the academic year 2009-10.  He taught, in collaboration with Dr. Julian Stallabrass, the MA Aestheticising Politics? The Political in Globalised Contemporary Art. This course explored the globalisation of contemporary art after the fall of Eastern European Communism, notably the increasing number of international biennales, and the rising of artists from the ‘developing world’ in the global arts scene.  Critical and theoretical texts were examined in this course, which also includes a series of in-depth case studies, focusing on current exhibitions, artist lectures and visits to artists or curators


2008-09

The Visiting Professors for the Academic Year 2008-09 were Professor Vanessa Ryan (Brown University) and Professor Sander Gilman, (Emory University) who were affiliated with the Andrew W Mellon Foundation MA.  Professor Vanessa Ryan, in collaboration with Professor Carline Arscott, taught the MA course The Aesthetic Body: Science, Aestheticism and the Image of the Body in British Art 1860-1900.  Professor Sander Gilman, in collaboration with Dr. Shulamith Behr, taught the MA course Arts in Exile in Britain 1933-1945: Politics and Cultural Identity.  In February 2009, Professor Vanessa Ryan gave a lecture entitled Identity, the Senses and Experience: When Art Isn't Work: Victorian Theories of Creativity at the Courtauld, as part of the 2009 Friend Lecture Series.  This lecture looked at the relevance of Victorian theories of automatic and reflexive thought for conceptions of inspiration and creativity in the period, making reference to a range of examples including the debate engendered by John Ruskin’s attack on Whistler’s Nocturne In Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (c. 1875). During his Visiting Professorship, Sander Gillman, also in collaboration with Shulamith Behr, organised the colloquium Listening to the Past: Oral History as a Resource at the Research Forum, to coincide with the exhibition Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain 1933-1945, held at the Ben Uri Gallery, The London Jewish Museum of Art, from 21 January to 19 April 2009, for which both scholars edited a catalogue.



2007-08

The 2007-8 Visiting Professors were Professor Hal Foster, chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, and Professor Stephen Campbell, Department of the History of Art at John Hopkins University. Professor Foster gave a series of lectures in Autumn 2007 on his new book on Pop Art. He discussed the work of Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter, exploring the different image economies set up by their work. As part of his Visiting Professorship, Professor Foster gave a seminar as part of the Writing Art History series, in which he explored the development of his writing practice through his diverse critical and historical projects, as well as giving an insight into the changing artistic and academic contexts since the late 1970s. Professor Campbell gave a series of lectures and seminars in the spring of 2008, which explored the rise of artistic self-consciousness about the idea of tradition in the work of several North Italian artists in the period 1450-1550, focusing on how it was shaped by concerns such as the conflicted relation to Rome and Central Italian art, by initiatives of religious and artistic reform, and by the conception of painting as a form of poetic invention and creative imitation. Lectures dealt with two major early projects of the 1450s by Andrea Mantegna - the San Zeno altarpiece and the Ovetari Chapel. Seminars explored the impact of Giorgione on Venetian art in, as well as the rise of a new modern idiom of sacred painting.


 2006-07

The Visiting Professor for 2006-7 was Professor Boris Groys, Professor of Philosophy and Media Theory at the Academy for Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung), Karlsruhe, Germany. From his book Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (Munich 1988, published in English as The Total Art of Stalinism, Princeton 1992) to the exhibition Dream Factory Communism: the Visual Culture of the Stalin Era he co-curated in Frankfurt in 2003-4, Professor Groys has established a position at the very forefront of post-Soviet studies, with an emphasis on visual arts, ideology and culture. In autumn 2006 he gave two lectures at the Courtauld, the first of which focused on his exhibition project entitled Religion as Medium. The second was part of the Research Forum’s ‘Intellectual Formations’ series, allowing Groys to discuss his career which has spanned many geographical locations as well as professions. In spring 2007 Groys continued his series with a lecture on installation art, using the work of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov as his case study. The series was concluded with a lecture on Groys’ exhibition Dream Factory Communism, which was accompanied by a film of the exhibition by his wife Natalia Nikitin.

 2005-6

 The Research Forum Visiting Professor for 2006 was Professor Whitney Davis (University of California at Berkeley). Professor Davis took his audience on an intellectual journey that traversed over six thousand years, beginning in pre-historic lower Nubia and ending in early twentieth-century Vienna. He did this in seven presentations based on his work on the Archaeologies of the Standpoint. He opened the Friends’ Spring Lectures of Distinguished Teachers with an introduction to the topic, which, as he explained, deals with the way that the standpoints of visual access to works of art have been conceptualized historically in different cultural traditions. His seminar series began with a talk on Prehistoric Palimpsests and Petroglyphic Palindromes and concluded with a tour of the house that Ludwig Wittgenstein built for his sister in Vienna. Intermediate stages included “the end of the world” (apocalypse imagery), “on being short” (Brunelleschi’s invention of linear perspective) and Fonthill Abbey.

Archaeologies of the Standpoint was used as the theme for the 2005-6 Research Forum / Conway Library project, the outcomes of which can be found on the Research Groups & Projects section of the Research Forum website.

2004-5

 The Research Forum Visiting Professor for 2005 was Professor Brigid Doherty (Princeton University). Professor Doherty gave a series of lectures and seminars in January 2005, on a variety of nineteenth and twentieth century topics, demonstrating the wide range of her research interests. The topics under discussion included ‘On the Possibility of Post-Minimal Modernism’, ‘Writing as Making Present: The Art of Hanne Darboven’, and ‘Berlin Dada Montage’.


Visiting Curators

 

2011-12

Rachel Ward was Curator (Middle East) in the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum from 1983 to 2000 and Director/Vice President of the Royal Asiatic Society from 2002 to 2008. Her research has been mainly focused on the history, art and archaeology of the Ayyubid and Mamluk period. Her publications include Süleyman the Magnificent, (co-author with J.M. Rogers, 1988); Islamic Metalwork (1993); Gilded and Enamelled Glass from the Middle East (editor, 1998) and many articles. She has lectured extensively for museums, universities and learned societies and is currently working on a Catalogue of Arab and Ottoman Metalwork in the British Museum and on the Mamluk glass finds from the excavation of the Citadel at Aleppo.

 

2008-09

 

The 2009 Visiting Curator was  Dr. Holm Bevers (Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin).


2007-08

The 2008 Visiting Curator was Michael Bury, Reader and Head of History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Michael Bury surveyed the Courtauld Gallery's collection of fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian prints, with a view to establishing a cataloguing project. He considered the content, origins, arrangement and use of this Courtauld collection. Throughout the spring term, he held a series of seminars on the study of Italian prints; in January, he offered graduate students and staff four master-classes on the study of sixteenth and seventeenth-century prints (principally Italian).

2005-6

 The 2005-6 Research Forum Visiting Curator was Chris Fischer (Founder and Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of Old Master Drawings, Copenhagen) who spent six weeks at the Courtauld in October 2005 and January 2006 with his research assistant Jesper Svenningen. They carried out invaluable work on the collection of Italian drawings, which included checking attributions and provenances and advising on the cataloguing of the collection. Chris Fischer also lectured on Why Provenance Matters, taught several MA classes and contributed to a well-attended workshop on ‘Teaching with Drawings’ held in January in the newly refurbished Print & Drawings Study Room.

 


Visiting Conservators

 

2011-12

 

Angela Miller is Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St Louis, distinguished teacher of American Studies and scholar of American art and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Professor Miller received her PhD from Yale University and has published widely. Her 1993 book, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875, was the winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association (1994) and the Charles Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian (1995). Her most recent book, American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (2007) is a collaborative project comprising a comprehensive, synthetic new history of the arts from a millennium before contact with Europe up to the present.

 

2010-11

 

Jim Coddington is the Agnes Gund Chief Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art In New York. He has lectured and published on a range of conservation and art historical topics, including Jackson Pollock, Cezanne and Pissarro, as well as the technical study of modern works of art.

 

Francesca Piqué graduated from the Courtauld in 1991 and simultaneously received her degree in physical chemistry. The following year she earned a master's degree in science for conservation from the Courtauld, the result of work she did at the Yungang grottoes in China during a 10-month internship with the Scientific department of the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI). In 1993 she joined the GCI as a research fellow in Special Projects. Her first assignment was research on the tomb of Tutankhamun. She went on to a documentation, conservation, and training project with the government of Benin involving earthen bas-reliefs at the Royal Palaces of Abomey. She also worked as a member of the team on the conservation of the hominid trackway in Laetoli, Tanzania, and on the conservation of The Last Judgment mosaic in Prague. She has been a permanent GCI staff member since 1996. She is currently part of the Institute's projects on China's Mogao grottoes and on the conservation of mosaics in situ.

 

2009-10

The Visiting Conservator for the academic year 2009-10 was Dr Ella Hendriks, Head of Conservation, van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. She visited the Courtauld for a week in March 2009 and returned for a second week in September 2009. Dr Hendriks gave a series of lectures and seminars concerning the technical study of Van Gogh's paintings, and conducted workshops with the staff and students of the Conservation & Technology Department.


2008-09

In 2008-09, the first Visiting Conservator was Charlotte Hale, who currently holds the post of Conservator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Charlotte completed the Postgraduate course in easel paintings conservation in 1983 after taking her first degree in Art History at UCL. She worked at the National Gallery in Washington and moved to her present post at the Met 20 years ago. Her visit occured from 20 to 31October, during which time she presented several lectures and seminars.

2006-7


The Research Forum Visiting Conservator for 2006-7 was Elke Oberthaler, Head of Conservation at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. During her first two-week stay at the Institute in May 2006 she gave seminars on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venetian paintings, in conjunction with staff and students from the Courtauld and staff from the National Gallery conservation department. She also worked with students in the Conservation department and Gallery staff, bringing her knowledge of the Vienna collection to the examination of paintings in the Courtauld Gallery. The second part of her visit in October happily coincided with an exhibition in Vienna on Bellini, Giorgione and Titian, which included the results of her research on the Titian paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. During the second part of her appointment she resumed her collaboration with members of the Courtauld and National Gallery conservation departments. She gave a public lecture on Recent Technical Studies of Venetian Paintings c. 1500-1520 from the Kunsthistorisches Museum and held an informal discussion, in the Gallery, on the exhibition David Teniers and the Theatre of Painting.