Five key new appointments have been made to The Courtauld, further bolstering the Institute’s reputation for art historical teaching and research excellence.
The new appointments are Dr Johanna Gosse, Lecturer in Lens and Time-Based Art Histories; Dr Felix Jäger, Lecturer in Early Modern Art and Material Culture; Dr Kyle Leyden, Lecturer in Early Modern European Architecture; Dr Meredyth Winter, Lecturer in Early Islamic Arts; and Dr Tom Young, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Art Histories.
A historian of postwar art and visual culture, Johanna Gosse specialises in experimental film and media. Her research is interdisciplinary and bridges art history, film and media studies, and visual studies. Johanna is Field Editor for Cinema, Media, and Performance for caa.reviews and was Executive Editor of Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus from 2018-23. Previously she was Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Culture, University of Idaho. In 2023-24, Johanna will be on research leave to take up the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professorship in the Department of History of Art at Oxford.
Felix Jäger is a postdoctoral faculty member at the Institute of Art History at Ludwig Maximilian University and a research associate at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. His published work explores the material cultures of early modern armour and their place within broader body histories. Other projects include a special issue edited volume on the legacy of Marxist art history in the German Democratic Republic, and a new book on the historiographies and methodologies of the apotropaic.
Kyle Leyden’s research focuses on the contextualisation of buildings and urban topologies within the milieu of political activity, philosophical thought, artistic taste and foreign influence, and explores how this can change our understanding of history and current views. His work places particular emphasis on the way buildings were intended to be experienced as cultural objects by contemporary and later societies, in addition to their active agency in political discourse and in constructing and sustaining narratives of place, identity and belonging. Following a career at the Bar of Ireland and in the built heritage sector, he completed a Ph.D. looking at the critical nexus between politics and architecture in eighteenth-century Ireland.
Meredyth Winter is a scholar of the medieval Abbasid Empire (750-1258) in Iraq and Iran whose research explores the impact of artisanal networks and craft technologies on Islamic culture. She joins The Courtauld after serving as Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and has previously taught at Colgate University, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and Harvard University. She holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies and Art History from Harvard University as well as an MA from the Bard Graduate Center, New York.
Currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick, Tom Young is researching the global history of lithographic printing. Prior to that, he was the project curator of the British Museum’s exhibition Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution, a curator at Lakeland Arts, and a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. His first book, Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c.1813–58, was published by the Paul Mellon Centre in June 2023.
Professor Mark Hallett, Märit Rausing Director said: “I’m delighted with the outcomes of our recent faculty searches and extend my congratulations to all the appointees. They bring an extraordinary range of art-historical expertise to The Courtauld and will further deepen and diversify our research and teaching. We warmly welcome them to our scholarly community.’
“We are thrilled to be renewing and extending our teaching and research in the History of Art,’ said Professor Alixe Bovey, Dean and Deputy Director. “These new posts will give us the opportunity to develop the field in new directions, ask important questions, and enrich our curricula and research across a broad span of time, cultures, and media.”
Dr Jäger, Dr Leyden and Dr Young join in September 2023. Dr Winter will join The Courtauld in September 2024.