What’s On at The Research Forum

The Research Forum offers a programme of both online and onsite events, publications and digital assets. Please do visit our YouTube page to catch up on our events from previous years.

Please get in touch with us at researchforum@courtauld.ac.uk if you have any questions regarding our programme. Our Autumn semester events will be announced soon.

Autumn Semester

Lecture, Research

On Parasocial Media: The Shoggoth and the Skeuomorph

6:00pm, 28 Oct 2025 | Free, booking essential

In the first event in our 2025-26 Asymmetry Distinguished Lecture Series, artist and writer Gary Zhexi Zhang will discuss the internet, AI, and the techno-politics of persona through an account of “parasocial media”. Online identity formation and the...

Waiting List Only

Lecture, Research

Filmmaking on the Border

5:30pm, 17 Nov 2025 | Free, booking essential

Join artist Eleonore de Montesquiou for an evening of film screenings and conversation on the complexities of filmmaking on the border. Drawing from her own experiences of displacement, Eleonore’s work explores the ambiguities of life on the margins....

Research, Talks

Story and Vision: Wonders of Creation

5:30pm, 19 Nov 2025 | Free, booking essential

Join Dr Ladan Akbarnia for this illustrated talk will explore the story and vision behind Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World, a touring exhibition organised by The San Diego Museum of Art and which was on view in S...

Lecture, Research

Cubism and Reality

5:30pm, 20 Nov 2025 | Free, booking essential

Join us for this book event celebrating Emeritus Professor Christopher Green’s new publication 'Cubism and Reality' (Bloomsbury, 2025). The book presents a fresh look at Braque, Picasso, and Juan Gris, considering their works not as conclusive statem...

Book cover with a deep purple background featuring the title
Waiting List Only

Lecture, Research

Surrealism and the Tarot

5:30am, 4 Dec 2025 | Free, booking essential

Published by Fulgur Press, 'Surrealism and the Tarot: a love story' is a groundbreaking and extensively illustrated collection, bringing together leading scholars to illuminate a fascinating but understudied aspect of surrealist practice.

Medieval Ottoman Illustration of a liquid-dispenser shaped as an enslaved servant, from Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari’s Compendium of the Mechanical Arts (1206, Amid, Turkey). The automaton figure wears a red robe and gold boots, holding a vessel with a bird on top, with pipes and mechanisms connecting to a cup. Folio 121v, Topkapı Palace Library, Istanbul (Ms. Ahmet III 3472).

Lecture, Research

The Medieval Instrumentality of AI

6:00pm, 9 Dec 2025 | Free, booking essential

In the third lecture in our 2025-26 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Professor Lamia Balafrej will examine AI against medieval conceptions of instrumentality, which were applied to both technology and slavery. Through a transhistorical, comparati...

Lecture, Research, The Courtauld Centre for the Art of the Americas

Frank O'Hara and MoMA, New York Poet, Global Curator

5:30pm, 11 Dec 2025 | Free, booking essential

Join art historian Dr Matthew Holman for this book launch and in conversation event celebrating the release of his new book 'Frank O’Hara & MoMA: New York Poet, Global Curator' (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Lecture, Research

Picturing Digital Infrastructures

6:00pm, 16 Dec 2025 | Free, booking essential

In the fourth lecture in our 2025-26 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Professor Anna Näslund will adress the platformization and datafication of picture collections from an informational infrastructural perspective, meaning how both textual and v...

Citations