Visiting Expert archive
The Visiting Experts programme facilitates an established scholar, conservator or artist to visit The Courtauld Institute of Art for a short amount of time – typically a week – and deliver a schedule of events. These generally include a public evening lecture, an intimate discussion session, and a site visit. Faculty and research students are particularly encouraged to engage with the scholar during their stay.
2017-18
Elizabeth Sears
Elizabeth Sears has two areas of specialization: European representational arts from the eighth through the fourteenth century and historiography. Much of her medieval research has involved close study of manuscripts, but her work has been characteristically thematic and problem-based (e.g. the iconography of sensory perception, author portraits and theories of authorship, guild regulations and the medieval critical eye). Her historiographical research, archive-based, has led her to study methods of image study. Publications include “Eye training: Goldschmidt/Wölfflin,” and treatments of figures standing in the Warburgian tradition including H. W. Janson, W. S. Heckscher, Edgar Wind, Fritz Saxl, Jean Seznec, and Kenneth Clark. She is currently engaged in writing a collective biography, tentatively titled Warburg Circles, 1929-1964, that throws light on a highly influential intellectual movement owed to scholars who emigrated from Germany in the Nazi era.
Alexander Nagel
Alexander Nagel is Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His book Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge University Press, 2000) won the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan prize for best book in Renaissance studies from the Renaissance Society of America. His study of Italian art and the Reformation, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (University of Chicago Press, 2011), won the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. His interest in the multi-temporal life of works of art led to the publication of Anachronic Renaissance (co-authored with Christopher Wood, Zone Books, 2010) and Medieval Modern: Art out of Time (Thames and Hudson, 2012). Recently, Professor Nagel has turned his attention to questions of orientation and configurations of place in Renaissance art.
2016-17
Melanie Gifford
Melanie Gifford is the Research Conservator for Painting Technology, National Gallery of Art Washington. On her visit to The Courtauld she gave a lecture and seminar based around her work for the exhibition Elegance and Refinement: the Still Life Paintings of Willem van Aelst (Houston and Washington, DC).
2015-16
Lina Bolzoni
Prof. Bolzoni is Professor of Italian Literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. She is one of the most celebrated scholars of her generation in Italy and has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, UCLA, New York University, and the Collège de France, as well as a visiting scholar at the Getty and visiting fellow at All Souls, Oxford. Her publications frequently focus on the relationship between literature and the visual arts in the Renaissance, or on the use of visual imagery in literature. She is especially well known for her work on memory, and on poetry and portraiture. Among her most lauded books are La stanza della memoria (1995; translated into English as The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, 2001); La rete delle immagini (2002; translated into English as The Web of Images: Vernacular Preaching from Its Origins to St. Bernardino da Siena, 2004); Poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento, (2008); and Il cuore di cristallo. Ragionamenti d’amore, poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento (2010).
Lina gave an evening lecture, Memory Palaces in the Renaissance, a lunchtime seminar on Orlando Furioso from the original editions to modern video art, followed by a visit to the National Gallery for faculty members and research students.
Keith Moxey
Born in Buenos Aires, Keith Moxey left Argentina to attend Edinburgh University. Following graduation he went to the United States where he attended the University of Chicago. Originally interested in Netherlandish art of the 15th and 16th century, he then focused on German art of the Reformation writing a book, Peasants, Warriors and Wives: Popular Imagery in the German Reformation (University of Chicago Press, 1989), about the broadsheet and pamphlet war between Catholics and Protestants. Fascinated by the philosophical issues raised by history writing’s attempts to account for the past in the present, his later publications have centered on issues of theory and method: The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics and Art History (Cornell University Press, 1994), The Practice of Persuasion: Politics and Paradox in Art History (Cornell University Press, 2001), and most recently Visual Time:The Image in History (Duke University Press, 2013).
Keith gave an evening lecture on Material Time, followed by an afternoon seminar on Heterochrony, and a visit to the Foundling Museum in Holborn to look at foundlings’ badges.
Jananne Al-Ani
A British-Iraqi film/video artist, Jananne is a highly regarded and very successful artist, exhibited internationally and collected in major museums in Europe and North America. In her recent work, she looks at the effects, and scars, of archaeology and war on the landscape of the Middle East. Jananne has worked with us closely starting with the Courtauld Bag (the 14th c metal bag of the ‘Court and Craft’ exhibition) and continuing with her artwork for the cover of the most recent issue of Immediations. I invited her to see the Bag under microscope, which inspired her to start a project looking at inlay and engraving on metal objects as scarred landscapes; she presented it preliminarily as micro-topographies at the conference I had organized at The Courtauld in May 2014. She responded to the Bag in part for the ways in which the workings of/on surfaces of such objects resonate with what she has been doing in her films shot as aerial journeys, and where ‘images of a landscape bear traces of natural and man-made activity.’
The Bag and micro-topographies have since developed into a larger project looking at the surface of that bag and other ‘time-traveler’ art objects in Western collections – Sacha and I are working toward a multi-institutional research project to include our metalwork collection and her work derived from such material. Her research into archival images and the subject of WWI intersect with the project she started as a result of the engagement with our Bag. This is an important intellectual venture – contemporary artistic practice and the resonance of the historical object without being pedantically, or self-consciously art historical. She speaks powerfully about her practice and is extremely good at thinking in a research-rich environment. At The Courtauld, our and our students’ interest in the global contemporary as well as the arts of Islam would greatly benefit from engaging with her; promise of productive new ways of connecting across time and geography. In summer 2016, on the invitation of the Department of War Studies at King’s College, she will be installing an exhibition on her WWI project; and I have a colleague (Lindsay Allan) at King’s who teaches archaeology of the Middle East and its 19th-20th century Orientalizing historiographies; these connections can provide new opportunities for us to expand on collegiality in the neighborhood.
Jannane’s evening lecture was entitled View from Above: Latent Images in the Landscape. She subsequently gave a seminar, Contested Landscapes, followed by a visit to the British Museum.
2014-15
Stephan Kemperdick
Stephan Kemperdick (1960) studied fine arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, then art history at Bochum University and at the Freie Universität Berlin, graduating in 1992. He was awarded his PhD on the Master of Flémalle in1996. He worked at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, 1999-2002; then on a collection catalogue at the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2003-04. In 2005-07 he was the curator of old master paintings at the Kunstmuseum Basel, and since 2008 curator of Early Netherlandish and German paintings at the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. He is the curator and/or co-curator of several exhibitions, e.g. The Early Portrait, Kunstmuseum Basel 2006; Hans Holbein the Younger. The Basel Years, Kunstmuseum Basel 2006; The Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden, Städel Museum Frankfurt, Gemäldegalerie Berlin 2008/09; The Road to Van Eyck, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam 2012/13. Stephan Kemperdick’s publications include: Der Meister von Flémalle. Die Werkstatt Robert Campins und Rogier van der Weyden, (Ars nova II), Turnhout 1997; Rogier van der Weyden, Cologne 1999; Deutsche Gemälde im Städel 1300-1550, 2 vol., with Bodo Brinkmann, Mainz 2002, 2005; Martin Schongauer. Eine Monographie, Petersberg 2004; and Deutsche und böhmische Gemälde 1230-1430, catalogue for the Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Museen Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Petersberg 2010.
Michael Ann Holly
Michael Ann Holly teaches critical theory, methodology, and historiography in art history. She was co-founder and chair of the Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester. She is the author and editor of studies on the historiography of and theory in art history, including Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History(1984), Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (1994), Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of Images (1996), The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective (1998), and Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies (2002). She is the recipient of a range of fellowships, including a Guggenheim, a Getty, and grants from CASVA, the ACLS, the NEH, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Her most recent book project on the history of art as a melancholy discipline, The Melancholy Artwas published in 2013 by Princeton University Press
Daniel Barber
Daniel A. Barber is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where he teaches the history of modern architecture. His research explores the relationship between the design fields and the emergence of global environmental culture across the 20th century. He received his PhD from Columbia University, and recently a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Articles have recently been published in Grey Room and Technology and Culture, as well as in the edited volumes A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno-Social’ Moment (MIT Press 2013),Architecture and Energy: Questions about Performance and Style (Routledge, 2013). Prof. Barber’s book, A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War will be published by Oxford University Press in early 2015.
2013-14
David Elliot
David Elliott is a curator and writer who has directed contemporary art museums and related institutions in Oxford, Stockholm, Tokyo, Istanbul, Sydney and Kiev. He is currently Artistic Director of A Time for Dreams, the IV International Biennale of Young Art, to open in Moscow in June 2014, co-curator of PANDAMONIUM: New Media Art from Shanghai (on show in Berlin at present), and associate curator of the Hors Piste Film Festival in Tokyo. He is also working on two traveling exhibitions for the UK and USA and on a book Art and Trousers: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Asian Art to be published in 2015.
He was President of CIMAM (the International Committee of ICOM for museums of modern and contemporary art) from 1998 to 2004, and is currently President of the Board of Triangle Art Network/Gasworks in London, Chairman of MOMENTUM in Berlin, a member of the Asia Advisory Board of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and a Visiting Professor in Curatorship at the Chinese University in Hong Kong.
A specialist in Soviet and Russian avant-garde, as well as in modern and contemporary Asian art, he has published widely in these fields as well as on many other aspects of contemporary art. In 2008-10 he was Artistic Director of the 17th Biennale of Sydney and in 2011-12 directed the inaugural International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Kiev, Ukraine. He has also advised the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charitable Trust on the development of the Central Police Station heritage site into a centre for contemporary art.
2012-13
Jacques Neuger
Jacques Neguer was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria and graduated from the Polytechnic of Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1986, with an MS Degree in Engineering Science in Chemistry. Between 1979 and 1992 he was conservator in the National Institute for Historical Monuments, Sofia, Bulgaria. He specialized in mosaics conservation at the Istituto Superiore Centrale del Restauro (ISCR), Rome, Italy. Since 1993 he has worked as a conservator in the Conservation Department of the Israel Antiquities Authority, becoming Head of the Art Conservation Section of the Conservation Department in 1994. He has been a member of ICCM (International Committee for Conservation Mosaics) since 1996 and an elected member of the board 2002-2005. Member of ICOMOS – Israel and Head of the Scientific Committee for Stone conservation.
Michele Maricola
Michele D. Marincola is Sherman Fairchild Chairman and Professor of Conservation of the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is also part-time Conservator for The Cloisters (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and coordinates conservation for the Acton Collection at Villa la Pietra in Florence (NYU). She has lectured and published widely on the techniques and conservation of medieval sculpture, conservation ethics and theory, and is currently working on a book on the treatment of polychrome wood sculpture.
Peter Stallybrass
Peter Stallybrass is Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the History of Material Texts. He is also a member of the American Philosophical Society and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at the University of London. Peter began his career as a mortician, but he has been teaching since 1973, first in England at the University of Sussex, and, since 1988, at Penn. He has also taught in Paris at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and at the Collège de France.
Among his awards are the Andrew Lang Gold Medal from the University of St. Andrew’s, the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Languages Association, and four teaching awards from Penn.
His books include The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986) with Allon White, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000) with Ann Rosalind Jones, and Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer (2006) with Jim Green. He has also collaborated with Jim Green in curating exhibitions on “Material Texts” at the Library Company of Philadelphia and on Benjamin Franklin and at the Grolier Club, and with Heather Wolfe on “Technologies of Writing in the Renaissance” at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Peter’s Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography on “Printing for Manuscript” will be published next year by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He is at present working with Roger Chartier on a history of the book from wax tablets to e-books.
Rafael Cardoso
Rafael Cardoso is a writer and art historian, holding a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art (1995). He is the author of numerous books on the history of Brazilian art and design, the most recent of which are Design para um mundo complexo (Cosac Naify, 2012); Impresso no Brasil, 1808-1930: Destaques da história gráfica no acervo da Biblioteca Nacional (Verso Brasil, 2009); and A arte brasileira em 25 quadros (1790-1930) (Record, 2008), as well as three works of fiction. He is associated with the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, as a member of the postgraduate faculty of its Instituto de Artes. He is also active as an independent curator, having recently curated the major exhibitions Rio de Imagens: Uma Paisagem em Construção (Museu de Arte do Rio, 2013); From the Margin to the Edge: Brazilian Art and Design in the 21st Century (Somerset House, London, 2012) and Eliseu Visconti: A Modernidade Antecipada (Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2011).
2011-12
Carlo Ginzburg
Carlo Ginzburg is among the most distinguished of historians, celebrated for his pioneering work forging cohesive social and cultural histories from the application of disparate but complementary disciplines to precise contexts. Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles and the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, he has also taught and held fellowships at, among others, the University of Bologna, the Warburg Institute, Princeton, Yale and Columbia Universities and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Aby Warburg Prize (1992), the Humboldt-Forschungspreis (2007) and the Balzan Prize for the History of Europe, 1400-1700 (2010). His many books, translated into more than 20 languages, include: The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller (1980); The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1983) ; The Enigma of Piero della Francesca (1985); Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (1989); Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1991); Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (1998): The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice (1999); History, Rhetoric, and Proof (1999); No Island is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective (2000).
Bronwen Wilson
Bronwen Wilson received her PhD in Art History from Northwestern University in 1999 and is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. Following a Postdoctoral Fellowship at UBC in 1999-2000, she taught at McGill University from 2000-2007 before returning to Vancouver to take up her present post. In 2003-4 Bronwen Wilson was a Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, subsequent to which she published her first book, The World in Venice: print, the city, and early modern identity (2005), awarded the 2006 Roland H. Bainton prize for Art History. She is now preparing her second book, Facing Early Modernity: portraits, physiognomy, and naturalism in Northern Italy, for publication. Her current research ranges from the mediation of travel in the Ottoman Empire by visual representation, to the ways in which cultural representations contributed to new forms of association before the normalisation of the public sphere in the eighteenth century.
Rachel Ward
Rachel Ward was Curator (Middle East) in the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum from 1983 to 2000 and Director/Vice President of the Royal Asiatic Society from 2002 to 2008. Her research has been mainly focused on the history, art and archaeology of the Ayyubid and Mamluk period. Her publications include Süleyman the Magnificent, (co-author with J.M. Rogers, 1988); Islamic Metalwork (1993); Gilded and Enamelled Glass from the Middle East (editor, 1998) and many articles. She has lectured extensively for museums, universities and learned societies and is currently working on a Catalogue of Arab and Ottoman Metalwork in the British Museum and on the Mamluk glass finds from the excavation of the Citadel at Aleppo.
Read Rachel Ward’s report on the Gambier Parry metalwork in The Courtauld Gallery
Rafael Cardoso
Rafael is a writer and art historian, holding a PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art (1995). He is the author of numerous books on the history of Brazilian art and design, the most recent of which are Design para um mundo complexo (Cosac Naify, 2012); Impresso no Brasil, 1808-1930: Destaques da história gráfica no acervo da Biblioteca Nacional (Verso Brasil, 2009); and A arte brasileira em 25 quadros (1790-1930) (Record, 2008), as well as three works of fiction. He is associated with the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, as a member of the postgraduate faculty of its Instituto de Artes. He is also active as an independent curator, having recently curated the major exhibitions Rio de Imagens: Uma Paisagem em Construção (Museu de Arte do Rio, 2013); From the Margin to the Edge: Brazilian Art and Design in the 21st Century (Somerset House, London, 2012) and Eliseu Visconti: A Modernidade Antecipada (Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2011).
Ann Hoenigswald
Ann Hoenigswald is Senior Conservator of Paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She completed her undergraduate degree in art history and history at the University of Pennsylvania and received both a certificate in conservation from the Intermuseum Conservation Association as well as a MA in conservation from Oberlin College.
She has treated numerous paintings from the collection of the National Gallery of Art and is particularly interested in nineteenth century and early modern works. Much of her research has focused on artists’ materials and techniques and on artists who reveal the process of painting. Her research tends to be done in close collaboration with art historians and conservation scientists. Recent publications have included the “short hand” of oil sketches on paper and the equipment of the plein air painter; varnishes, surface appearance and the intent of the artist; Picasso studies; and the history of restoration. She is responsible for coordinating the conservation contributions to the National Gallery of Art’s forthcoming Systematic Catalogue of paintings from the second half of the nineteenth century and has worked with the web team at the Gallery to produce websites on Manet and Picasso.
She has been the recipient of the CASVA (Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts) paired fellowship in Conservation and also was an invited Guest Scholar at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Neville Agnew
Neville Agnew joined the Getty Conservation Institute in 1988. He has a PhD in chemistry and worked in academia in South Africa and Australia prior to changing to heritage conservation in 1980. He has participated in many of the GCI’s research and international field projects and has led the initiative in China since 1989. Currently he leads the collaboration of the GCI with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities for the Valley of the Queens and Tutankhamen’s tomb projects. He has authored many publications in chemistry and conservation and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites, and for eight years was a board member of the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (a program of the U.S. National Park Service). Dr Agnew organized the conservation theme at the 5th World Archaeological Congress (WAC-5) and edited the subsequent publication. His association with conservation in China has resulted in a number of awards: The Friendship Award of the State Council in 2000; the International Scientific and Technological Cooperation Award of the PRC in 2005; and awards from Gansu Province and the Dunhuang Academy. Dr Agnew is currently Senior Principal Project Specialist in the Field Projects department of the GCI.
2010-11
T. J. Clark
T. J. Clark is one of the world’s leading authorities on the history French art of the nineteenth century and modernism, a Courtauld alumnus and Professor Emeritus of Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Having visited the Courtauld in January 2011 to give a paper addressing the relationship between the space and action represented in Cézanne’sCard Players, at the conference Modernist Games: Cézanne and his Card Players, Professor Clark marked his professorship with a lecture in May, The Monster PIcasso, focusing on the large painting Picasso did in 1927, Painter and Model, now in Tehran. It examined the turn in Picasso’s work in the later 1920s towards an imagery of sex and violence, and, more generally, the meaning of monstrosity in his art. In particular, it asked how the new extreme imagery affected Picasso’s distinctive feeling for space, and whether it led him to reconfigure the worldview that was Cubism.
Anne Wagner
Anne Wagner is Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley, Henry Moore Foundation Research Curator at Tate National and Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of York. She studied at Yale and Brown Universities and received her PhD from Harvard. Professor Wagner is the author of several books including studies of modern British sculpture, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner and Georgia O’Keefe. Whilst at the Courtauld she lectured and gave a research seminar on Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt, considering the implications of their work, not least in terms of the challenges they level at Minimalism and the modern repackaging of time. Professor Wagner also presented a paper to the Material Life of Things research group, discussing the Tate project to photograph the sculpture of Henry Moore.
Ursula Weekes
Ursula Weekes was formerly Supervisor of the Print Room at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. She gained her PhD in 2002 from the Courtauld Institute of Art, published in 2004 as Early Engravers and their Public : the Master of the Berlin Passion and manuscripts from convents in the Rhine-Maas region, ca. 1450-1500. From 2004 to 2010 she was based in Delhi as a Postdoctoral Commonwealth Fellow at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, and she also taught on Mughal and Renaissance art for the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is now in London, completing her book on ‘The Great Mughals and the Art of Europe’. Dr Weekes gave her Visiting Professor’s Seminar,Art, Experience and Displaced Identities: Getting to the Heart of Why the Mughals Embraced European Art, in December 2010.
2008-09
Holm Bevers
Holm Bevers from the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin was the Research Forum Visiting Conservator for 2008-09.
2007-08
Michael Bury
The 2008 Visiting Curator was Michael Bury, Reader and Head of History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Michael Bury surveyed the Courtauld Gallery’s collection of fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian prints, with a view to establishing a cataloguing project. He considered the content, origins, arrangement and use of this Courtauld collection. Throughout the spring term, he held a series of seminars on the study of Italian prints; in January, he offered graduate students and staff four master-classes on the study of sixteenth and seventeenth-century prints (principally Italian).
Hal Foster
Professor Foster is chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, and gave a series of lectures in Autumn 2007 on his new book on Pop Art. He discussed the work of Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter, exploring the different image economies set up by their work. As part of his Visiting Professorship, Professor Foster gave a seminar as part of the Writing Art History series, in which he explored the development of his writing practice through his diverse critical and historical projects, as well as giving an insight into the changing artistic and academic contexts since the late 1970s.
Stephen Campbell
Stephen Campbell is Professor of the Department of the History of Art at John Hopkins University, and gave a series of lectures and seminars in the spring of 2008, which explored the rise of artistic self-consciousness about the idea of tradition in the work of several North Italian artists in the period 1450-1550, focusing on how it was shaped by concerns such as the conflicted relation to Rome and Central Italian art, by initiatives of religious and artistic reform, and by the conception of painting as a form of poetic invention and creative imitation. Lectures dealt with two major early projects of the 1450s by Andrea Mantegna – the San Zeno altarpiece and the Ovetari Chapel. Seminars explored the impact of Giorgione on Venetian art in, as well as the rise of a new modern idiom of sacred painting.
2005-6
Chris Fischer
The 2005-6 Research Forum Visiting Curator was Chris Fischer (Founder and Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of Old Master Drawings, Copenhagen) who spent six weeks at the Courtauld in October 2005 and January 2006 with his research assistant Jesper Svenningen. They carried out invaluable work on the collection of Italian drawings, which included checking attributions and provenances and advising on the cataloguing of the collection. Chris Fischer also lectured on Why Provenance Matters, taught several MA classes and contributed to a well-attended workshop on ‘Teaching with Drawings’ held in January in the newly refurbished Print & Drawings Study Room.
Whitney Davis
The Research Forum Visiting Professor for 2006 was Professor Whitney Davis (University of California at Berkeley). Professor Davis took his audience on an intellectual journey that traversed over six thousand years, beginning in pre-historic lower Nubia and ending in early twentieth-century Vienna. He did this in seven presentations based on his work on the Archaeologies of the Standpoint. He opened the Friends’ Spring Lectures of Distinguished Teachers with an introduction to the topic, which, as he explained, deals with the way that the standpoints of visual access to works of art have been conceptualized historically in different cultural traditions. His seminar series began with a talk on Prehistoric Palimpsests and Petroglyphic Palindromes and concluded with a tour of the house that Ludwig Wittgenstein built for his sister in Vienna. Intermediate stages included “the end of the world” (apocalypse imagery), “on being short” (Brunelleschi’s invention of linear perspective) and Fonthill Abbey.
Archaeologies of the Standpoint was used as the theme for the 2005-6 Research Forum / Conway Library project, the outcomes of which can be found on the Research Groups & Projects section of the Research Forum website.
2004-05
Brigid Doherty
The Research Forum Visiting Professor for 2005 was Professor Brigid Doherty (Princeton University). Professor Doherty gave a series of lectures and seminars in January 2005, on a variety of nineteenth and twentieth century topics, demonstrating the wide range of her research interests. The topics under discussion included ‘On the Possibility of Post-Minimal Modernism’, ‘Writing as Making Present: The Art of Hanne Darboven’, and ‘Berlin Dada Montage’.