Explore The Courtauld Research Forum Programme for Autumn 2024

Welcome back to The Courtauld for the 2024/25 academic year! The Courtauld Research Forum is back, offering a programme of onsite and online events at our Vernon Square Campus and The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, and is pleased to announce the programme for Autumn 2024.

Highlights from our Autumn semester include events from our new research clusters and this year’s Frank Davis Memorial Series: A Century of Surrealism: Resistance and the Image Since the Manifesto of Surrealism, organised by Professor Gavin Parkinson (Professor in European Modernism, The Courtauld).

Frank Davis Memorial Lectures 2024-25
A Century of Surrealism: Resistance and the Image Since the Manifesto of Surrealism

The Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series 2024-25 harnesses and contributes to a moment of unparalleled interest in Surrealism on the centenary of the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924, timed to begin as major exhibitions and events taking place across the world. Resistance and image are the main themes, placing emphasis on the path taken by Surrealists in the period from WWII up to our own day.

Chronological and episodic, this five-part lecture series aims to suggest development and transformation since the Manifesto, where art was reduced to a footnote in the years before the Surrealists turned to politics.

Explore the full lecture series and book your free tickets here.

In addition, other highlights of The Courtauld’s Research Forum programming will include:

• The Sacred Traditions & The Arts seminar Poetry and Politics in Buddhism and Hindu Visions of Self and Other will explore kingship in early modern Sri Lanka and the paradox of divine love in Hindu devotional poetry. (Free, booking essential)
• Christianity before Conversion: Helen Gittos proposes a new framework for thinking how radical changes in faith happened in early medieval England. (Free, booking essential)
• The Paul Crossley Memorial Lecture, The Four Walks of the Cloister: Paradise and Practice in Medieval Monastery, will reexamine the monastic cloister as a place to be transcended. (Free, booking essential)
• Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Work and Legacy of Mark Girouard: a one-day symposium organised jointly by The Courtauld, the University of Kent, and the SAGHB, celebrating the extraordinary work and legacy of Mark Girouard (1931-2022), one of Britain’s greatest architectural historians. (£15, booking essential)
• Art and Management: join Elise Archias for a talk exploring how the artistic shifts of the 1960s aligned with the professional-managerial class’s drive to solve social problems through technical solutions, though the lens of artists. (Free, booking essential)

And much more!

Research Forum events are open to all and support advanced inquiry into the history of art, conservation, and museum studies. Find out more and book your tickets now: