This month we are delighted to announce that the Terra Foundation for American Art has confirmed a further three years of support for our Centre for American Art here at The Courtauld, by way of a generous $275,000 grant (2019-2022). The Centre was launched in 2016 under the aegis of the Sackler Research Forum with support from the Terra Foundation.
The grant will underpin all aspects of the Centre’s work, fostering essential partnerships and research into historical American art which remains relatively little studied and taught in European Universities. While fully embracing the contemporary, the Centre has a major ambition to develop scholarship and postgraduate teaching investigating American art of all periods, including prior to 1980. Over the next three years, this grant will continue to part-fund the post of Professor David Peters Corbett, Director of the Centre, and allow us to run additional lectures and conferences to further raise the profile, awareness and further understanding of American art pre 1970.
The grant will also fund a six-month postdoctoral fellowship, a call for applications will be issued in was issued in February 2019 with a deadline of 17 March. There were 24 strong candidates. Shortlisting is underway by a committee chaired by Professor Peters Corbett and we expect an appointment to be made by the end of April.
Since 2016, the Centre for American Art has successfully brought together faculty with strong interests in American art, including Dr Jo Applin, providing a focused platform for research and wider engagement. The Centre offers two taught MA programmes: Professor Peters Corbett’s New York – London – Paris, 1880–1920, and The Sixties: Eccentric, Erotic, Psychotic, taught by Dr Applin. The Centre currently has 19 MA students (against a target of 16) and five fully funded PhD students.
As part of a busy events programme, to date the Centre has run thirteen lectures, six two-day conferences, and two film screenings focused on American art pre 1970. Key partners for the conferences included Oxford, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, KCL, and the University of Washington at St Louis. Speakers at these events came from many UK and US, and some European universities, including Oxford, Yale, Stanford, Cambridge, Cornell, Institute of Fine Arts and NYU. We also formed a partnership with the University of Delaware, exchanged teaching, and are making plans for collaborative research projects.
In 2019, we have ambitious plans to build on the momentum of the past three years, and we will host major speakers from Yale, Harvard, VU Amsterdam, UCL and the University of Southern California. We will also host four conferences in collaboration with Sussex, American University (Washington, DC) and Virginia Commonwealth University; Free University Berlin and Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne; and KCL.
To find out more about the Centre’s work and upcoming programme listings, please visit our website: Crtld.art/centre-for-american
To find out how you can support the Centre and postgraduate students specialising in American art history, please contact Lila Kanner, Head of Philanthropy, at lila.kanner@courtauld.ac.uk