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.

Spring Semester

Lecture, Research

Preservation of Cultural Heritage in Japan

6:00pm, 4 Mar 2026

This lecture by Yuki Russell will appraise the issues around operation of heritage preservation in Japan. While experiencing upheavals such as mass vandalism in the 19th century and World War II, the management of cultural heritage preservation has b...

A medieval manuscript illustration showing a genealogical diagram. At the top, a crowned figure sits enthroned within a circular frame, from which decorative lines extend downward to five individual roundels, each containing a painted portrait with a coloured border. Below, the branching line continues to a larger roundel depicting another seated crowned figure. The background parchment includes handwritten Latin text, stylised flowering plants, and two trees flanking the lower section of the page. The artwork features rich reds, blues and golds typical of illuminated manuscripts.

Waiting List

Conferences, Research

Memory and Medieval Material Culture

10:00am, 6 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join us for our annual Medieval Postgraduate Colloquium. This year, we will explore the complex and dynamic relationship between memory and the material culture of the Middle Ages. In our digital age, memory is both permanent and fleeting: forever en...

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Waiting List

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

Kara Walker, Contemporary Art, and the Black Female Bottom

6:00pm, 9 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join Dr Tiffany E. Barber for this lecture examining the material and affective implications of artist Kara Walker’s recent turn to public sculpture, and the connections she draws between the rawness of slavery's memory in the US and the UK.

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A Renaissance-style painting showing an army besieging the city of Rome. Soldiers carrying colourful banners and pikes gather in the foreground, while the densely built city with red rooftops stretches across the middle ground. Key monuments and fortifications are visible, with rolling green hills and a cloudy sky in the distance. The scene depicts the 1527 Sack of Rome.

Waiting List

Research

The Renaissance as Historical Laboratory: The Case of the Sack of Rome of 1527

6:00pm, 10 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Guido Rebecchini, Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art

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Waiting List

Research, Talks

Whole in the part: medieval experiments in transcendence

5:30pm, 11 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join Dr Anya Burgon for a talk introducing the phenomenon of downscaled worlds in late-medieval culture – from the many images of the salvator mundi with the world in his hands, to prayer nuts, to the ‘atomic’ prayers of the Cloud of Unknowing, and s...

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Black‑and‑white photograph of a tall, curved observatory building with smooth, sculptural walls and a domed roof. The structure features narrow, rounded windows arranged in a vertical line and sits in a grassy landscape bordered by trees.

Lecture, Research

Architecture, War, Cement: Researching and Digitally Mapping the German Building Economy in the World Wars

6:00pm, 12 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join Professor Paul Jaskot on this lecture, exploring the role of the building economy during war through archival evidence and digital mapping tools. Working from a World War I database of the Dyckerhoff & Widmann (Dywidag) construction firm, the pa...

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Pastoral painting of church and large tree, with a rainbow in the sky

Conferences, Research, The Manton Centre for British Art

Research Notes: Views of their Own: Rediscovering and Re-presenting the Work of Women Artists

10:30am, 13 Mar 2026 | Tickets £10-20, booking essential

Bringing together art historians and curators, join us for this conference, which will explore various approaches to the complexities of bringing to light artists long overlooked by art history.

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Plan on paper of a Coal Mine and instructions on how to ventilate it.

Lecture, Research

Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction

5:30pm, 19 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join author Stephanie O'Rourke for a panel discussion with professors John Tresch and Susan Siegfried to mark the launch of O'Rourke's major new book, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction: Europe and its Colonial Networks, 1780-1850 (Chicago U...

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Photograph of Robert Barry in his studio, holding a piece of white paper to the camera with the word TIME on it.

Research

Robert Barry – The Defining of It…

6:00pm, 19 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join author Mathieu Copeland for a conversation with Professor Sarah Wilson, marking the launch of Copeland’s new book "Robert Barry – The Defining of It…", the first comprehensive monograph to explore the complete body of work by one of contemporary...

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A mixed-media painting featuring the outlined figure of a person, painted in bright orange hues, with textured hair. A hair clipper is positioned above the head, with its cord, made out of plastic beads, looping around the composition. The background combines wood‑panel textures and light-coloured surfaces. There are costume jewellery elements collaged onto the eyes and cheeks of the figure, as if crying diamonds.

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

Devan Shimoyama in conversation with Alex Bispham and Pia Gottschaller

6:00pm, 23 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join artist Devan Shimoyama for an in conversation on his artistic practice, weaving together popular culture, mythological archetypes, and personal narrative through lavishly embellished surfaces

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Black and white photograph of Southampton Old Town Wall, with three children by it

Research, The Manton Centre for British Art

The State of the Field: Photography

6:00pm, 24 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join us for an evening panel discussion, exploring the state of the field of photography.

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A manuscript page featuring handwritten text in brown ink with occasional red annotations. Along the left margin are two simple line drawings of tall, rectangular towers. Each tower is connected by diagonal sight‑lines to small sketches of a measuring device or viewing instrument positioned on the right. The diagrams appear to illustrate principles of perspective or measurement alongside the written notes.

Lecture, Research

Time, Body and Building: Architecture and Timekeeping in Late Medieval Italy

5:30pm, 25 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join Dr Giosuè Fabiano for this lecture exploring the ingenious ways medieval monks used shifting sunlight, starlight and architectural design to measure the passage of time, revealing remarkable visual alignments and time‑keeping practices embedded ...

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