BA (Victoria), PGDip (Oxford), MA, PhD (Courtauld)

 

Contact details

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House

Strand

London

WC2R 0RN

 

ayla.lepine@courtauld.ac.uk

Dy Ayla Lepine  

Prior to obtaining her PhD at The Courtauld, Ayla received qualifications in both Art History and Theology. Her work focuses on Victorian visual culture and sacred space, and her thesis research concerned G. F. Bodley's Gothic Revival projects at Oxford and Cambridge. In June 2011 she co-convened a major international conference with Caroline Levitt on Intersections: Architecture and Poetry.


Ayla has taught postgraduate and undergraduate courses as a Visiting Lecturer at Warwick University, The Courtauld, and King's College London. Her teaching subjects have ranged from the Aesthetic Movement and London's Victorian architecture to queer perspectives on nineteenth-century imagery and the perception of art as a theological medium.


Her work has been published in Music and Modernism (ed. Charlotte de Mille, 2011), Art and Christianity, The Burlington Magazine, and The Architects' Journal. With Laura Cleaver, she is co-editor of Gothic Legacies: Four Centuries of Tradition and Innovation in Art and Architecture. Ayla has recently delivered papers on Victorian churches, Anglican convents and textiles, cityscapes as soundscapes, and the sacramental resonances of contemporary installation art. She is also currently researching global manifestations of Anglicanism c.1829-1914, and writing a book on the persistence of the Gothic style beyond the Victorian period.


Throughout 2012 Ayla is running a project through The Courtauld Research Forum titled Revival: Utopia, Identity, Memory. This will explore revivalism as a global art and architectural phenomenon from the nineteenth century to the present. The project's components include a virtual exhibition, a lecture series, a workshop, and a major conference.

Selected recent and forthcoming publications


Book Chapters

'Global Anglicanism's Art & Architectural Revolution, 1829-1914', in Rowan Strong, ed., Oxford History of Anglicanism (OUP, forthcoming 2014)

'Threshold Architecture: George Edmund Street, William Burges and the Crimea Memorial Church in Istanbul', in Stephen Caffey and Mohammad Gharipour, eds., Sacred Precincts: Non-Muslim Sites in Islamic Societies (Brill, forthcoming 2013)

'Installation as Encounter: Ernesto Neto, Do Ho Suh and Kathleen Herbert Considered', in Rina Arya, ed., Contemplations of the Spiritual in Contemporary Art (Peter Lang, forthcoming 2012)

'Sacred Performance: Two Instances of Musical Architecture in Cambridge', in C. De Mille, ed., Music and Modernism, c.1849-1950 (Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp. 162-81

Van Gogh Self PortraitEmbroidered panel designed by T. Garner (?) for Watts & Company, late nineteenth century. Elizabeth Hoare Gallery, Liverpool Cathedral.

Articles and Essays

'At the Threshold: Victorian Ecclesiastical Textiles', Papers of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies (March 2012)

'Watts & Company, 1874', BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History, online resource for www.ravon.umontreal.ca, Dino Felluga, ed. (forthcoming 2012)

'Traversing the Triad: Norwich Cathedral's Japanese Garden', with Helena Capkova, Art and Christianity (summer 2011)

'Drawing on the Past', Courtauld Gallery Education Resource for Life, Legend, Landscape: Victorian Drawings and Watercolours (March 2011)

Reviews

Dominic Aidan Bellenger (ed.), Downside: An Architectural History (London: Merrell, 2011), The Tablet (December 2011)

Karla Cavarra Britton (ed.), Constructing the Ineffable: Contemporary Sacred Architecture (Yale School of Architecture/Yale University Press, 2010), The Architects' Journal (September 2011)

The Cult of Beauty, V&A exhibition, The Burlington Magazine (June 2011)

Selected recent and forthcoming events


'Building the Kingdom: Architecture for Religious Communities', session co-chaired with Kate Jordan, Society of Architectural Historians 66th Annual Conference, Buffalo, NY (April 2013)

Convents and Monasteries in Victorian Britain, Victorian Society Study Day, co-convened with Kate Jordan (October 2012)

'Backward Glances or Profound Progress? Transatlantic Gothic's 'Restrained Power' as Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde', New Directions in Gothic Revival Studies Worldwide, Kent University (July 2012)

'Modernism's "Other": Lost Histories of Architecture', session co-chaired with Alan Powers, AAH 38th Annual Conference, Open University, Milton Keynes (March 2012)

'"The Soul of Material": Art and Architecture as Sensory Experience at the Transformative Threshold', Sensational Religion: Sense and Contention in Material Practice, Yale University (November 2011)

'Framing the Unspeakable: Desire and Embodiment in the Photography of Alice Austen and Julia Margaret Cameron', The Feminist Art History Conference, American University (November 2011)

'Always Praying, Always Working: Anglican Nuns and Victorian Ecclesiastical Textiles', Who Were the Nuns?, Queen Mary College (June 2011)

'Wall of Sound: Musical Architecture', Performing Art History, The Courtauld Institute of Art (May 2011)

'Designing for Monasticism in Victorian Oxford', Historians of British Art Session, CAA 99th Annual Conference, New York (February 2011)