Courtauld Books Online is a series of online, Open Access scholarly books published by The Courtauld Institute of Art. The series includes research publications that emerge from Courtauld Research Forum events and Courtauld research projects involving an array of outstanding scholars from art history, conservation, and curation across the world.
The series consists of volumes edited by leading scholars in the field and shaped by a rigorous editorial and peer-review process. It is Diamond Open Access, meaning that its publication is funded by the Courtauld and the volumes are freely available to read online and to download without charge.
The series has been developed in the context of The Courtauld’s emphasis on world-leading research that shapes collective understanding of the visual arts past and present and champions the importance to our society of cultural knowledge, understanding, and practice. We support research in art history, conservation, and curating that produces new knowledge and understanding, and new methods of analysis and interpretation, to shape and advance our respective disciplines, and to address intellectual, cultural and societal challenges.
Editor: Dr Stephen Whiteman (The Courtauld)
Courtauld Books Online Advisory Board:
Paul Binski (University of Cambridge)
Thomas Crow (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)
Michael Ann Holly (Starr Director Emeritus of the Research and Academic Program, Clark Art Institute
Latest Release
Imagining the Apocalypse: Art and the End Times
Edwin Coomasaru and Theresa Deichert eds.
What are the politics of picturing the end times? This online, open-access essay collection explores how art and visual culture has imagined Armageddon across the globe from the eighteenth century to the present. The book considers the ways in which apocalypticism has been contested by social conservatives and progressives, drawn on to perpetuate or challenge structures of power. Contributors discuss homophobia and queer utopias, climate change and nuclear anxieties, folk monsters and fears of revolt, imperial violence and anti-colonial imagination, the staging of conflict and disaster, popular culture and fascism, faith and denial in church congregations. Each reveal how a series of contradictions underpin the end times: beginnings and endings, annihilation and revelation.
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