Following a long and distinguished career at the Institute spanning thirty-five years, Professor Katie Scott has retired.
Professor Scott is one of the world’s leading specialists on French art and architecture of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. She has written extensively on topics related to the period, focusing in particular on the intersections between art, architecture, and the decorative arts, and on the relationship between the visual arts and the law. Her publications include the two deeply researched and richly argued monographs, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (1995) and Becoming Property: Art, Theory and Law in Early Modern France (2018).
A consummate polymath, Professor Scott engages with the social, cultural, and intellectual contexts in which art was produced and consumed during the early modern period. Her theoretically informed, highly interdisciplinary approach brings together insights from art history, architectural history, material culture, and cultural history to provide a richer understanding of the visual and material world of early modern Europe. She is widely recognised for her contributions to the field of art history, not least by the French Government: Professor Scott is soon to be conferred with the prestigious Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Mérite. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.
Professor Scott has always been a highly collaborative scholar. She is a member of an interdisciplinary research group that unites scholars in the history and philosophy of science and the history of art from UCLA, McGill and The Courtauld, and is on the editorial boards of Perspective: La revue de l’INHA, the reference journal published by the National Institute of Art History since 2006, and Early Modern French Studies (formerly Seventeenth-Century French Studies). She was also a contributing member of the Courtauld’s Material Life of Things project, organised and chaired by Francesco Lucchini in 2010.
Professor Mark Hallett, Märit Rausing Director, said: ‘Katie and I go a long way back: I remember attending her job presentation when I was an MA student at the Courtauld. I was bowled over by her brilliance then and have been bowled over ever since. Since joining us in 1988, Katie has brought an unwavering lucidity, rigour, and dedication to everything she has done at the Courtauld. She is a scholar of great originality and ambition, and a teacher who has constantly encouraged her students to make the very best of their talents. She has also been a constant friend and mentor to many of her colleagues. I look forward to seeing her continuing to make an important contribution to the Courtauld in her new role as Professor Emerita.’
All of us at The Courtauld wish Professor Scott the very best in her retirement.