The Centre for American Art

The Centre for American Art at The Courtauld was established in September 2016 with the help of a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. The Centre exists to support and develop research in the field of American art of all periods, from the earliest moment to the present day, and in its international, transnational and global contexts. The Centre maintains a vibrant programme of lectures and conferences that feature leading scholars of American art from around the globe. In addition, we are pleased to offer residential six-month postdoctoral fellowships for early career researchers.

Professor Jo Applin (Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art) is Director of The Centre for American Art.

The Centre for American Art organises major international conferences, hosts regular seminar series of visiting speakers, welcomes Visiting Professors, supports PhD students’ research-related travel to the US, and develops and runs major research projects in the field. It provides an intellectual home and focus for The Courtauld’s PhD students, MA students, and postdoctoral fellows in American art. The Centre seeks to develop relationships with European and UK partners and acts as a focus to extend existing international collaborations with historians of American art in North America and Europe. 

The Centre supports MA teaching in American subjects, including “The Sixties: Eccentric, Erotic, Psychotic” (Professor Jo Applin), “Ecologies in American Art, 1950 to Now” (Dr Lucy Bradnock), “Circum-Atlantic Visual Culture, c1770-1830” (Dr Esther Chadwick) and “New York-London-Paris, 1880-1940” (Professor David Peters Corbett), “Painters at Work: Material Reinventions of a Medium, 1945-Now”, (Dr Pia Gottschaller), “Telling Stories: performing identities and histories in art (1970 to the present)”, and “Black Futures: Reimagining Modernism after critical race” (Professor Dot Price).