Research Forum

Visiting Scholars

Visiting Professors

 

The Research Forum Visiting Professors for 2011-12 are Carlo Ginzburg and Bronwen Wilson

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.

 

 

The Andrew W Mellon Foundation Visiting Professor for 2011-12 is Juliet Mitchell

 

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.

 

 

The Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor for 2011-12 is Angela Miller

 

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.

 

Archive of previous Visiting Scholars

Visiting Curators

 

The Research Forum Visiting Curator for 2011-12 is Rachel Ward

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.

 

 

Archive of previous Visiting Curators

Visiting Conservators

 

The Research Forum Visiting Conservators for 2011-12 are

Dr Neville Agnew and Dr Ann Hoenigswald

 

Neville Agnew is Senior Principal Project Specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles and a colleague of last year’s Visiting Conservator, Francesca Piqué.  A chemist and conservator who trained in South Africa, Australia and England, he has worked on projects as varied as the Lark Quarry dinosaur stampede site in central Queensland, wall paintings in the Nefertari tomb and the Great Sphinx in Egypt, the bas-reliefs of the royal Palaces of Abomey and the Laetoli hominid trackway in Tanzania. As leader of the GCI’s China Initiative since 1989, his work has involved not only the conservation of World Heritage Sites including the Mogao and Yungang Buddhist grottoes but also the establishment of a heritage conservation charter, published as China Principles: Conservation and Management Principles for Cultural Heritage Sites in China, which is now established methodology in China and espoused by China ICOMOS.  Dr Agnew is the author of over 100 publications in research chemistry and conservation, and recently edited Conservation of Ancient Sites on the Silk Road: Proceedings from the Second International Conference on the Conservation of Grotto Sites (2010).  Whilst at the Courtauld Dr Agnew will be joined by his colleague from the GCI,   Dr Martha Demas, who will collaborate on seminars in the Research Forum and the Courtauld Conservation Department.

 

 

Ann Hoenigswald is Senior Conservator of Paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Her research and practice as a conservator and conservation scientist have been widely published and her recent work on the Chester Dale Collection of Impressionist and Modernist Art has led to new insights into the materials and techniques of many of the most important painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

 

 

Archive of previous Visiting Conservators