What’s On at The Research Forum

The Research Forum offers a programme of both online and onsite events, publications and digital assets. Please do visit our YouTube page to catch up on our events from previous years.

Please get in touch with us at researchforum@courtauld.ac.uk if you have any questions regarding our programme.

Spring Semester

Oil painting by Peter Paul Rubens depicting a riverside landscape by moonlight. The sky is very richly textured, and painted in dark blue tones. The moon lights the scene, and in the foreground you can spot a horse grazing by the riverside.

Lecture, Research

Research Notes: Surveying Rubens’s late landscapes

6:30pm, 9 Feb 2026 | Free, booking essential

On the occasion of the temporary reunion of the Courtauld Gallery’s Peter Paul Rubens’s Landscape by Moonlight (1635—40) with the Barber Institute of Fine Art’s A Landscape Near Het Steen (1635—40), join Dr Bert Watteeuw for a lecture exploring the l...

Research, Talks

Methods for Ecocritical Art History

5:30pm, 2 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Marking the publication of Methods for Ecocritical Art History, edited by Olga Smith and Andrew Patrizio, this panel explores what an ecocritical approach can offer art historians, and what the interdisciplinary project of ecocriticism stands to gain...

Lecture, Research

Preservation of Cultural Heritage in Japan

6:00pm, 4 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

This lecture by Yuki Russell will appraise the issues around operation of heritage preservation in Japan. While experiencing upheavals such as mass vandalism in the 19th century and World War II, the management of cultural heritage preservation has b...

A medieval manuscript illustration showing a genealogical diagram. At the top, a crowned figure sits enthroned within a circular frame, from which decorative lines extend downward to five individual roundels, each containing a painted portrait with a coloured border. Below, the branching line continues to a larger roundel depicting another seated crowned figure. The background parchment includes handwritten Latin text, stylised flowering plants, and two trees flanking the lower section of the page. The artwork features rich reds, blues and golds typical of illuminated manuscripts.

Conferences, Research

Memory and Medieval Material Culture

9:30am, 6 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join us for our annual Medieval Postgraduate Colloquium. This year, we will explore the complex and dynamic relationship between memory and the material culture of the Middle Ages. In our digital age, memory is both permanent and fleeting: forever en...

Lecture, Research, The Courtauld Centre for the Art of the Americas

Kara Walker, Contemporary Art, and the Black Female Bottom

6:00pm, 9 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join Dr Tiffany E. Barber for this lecture examining the material and affective implications of artist Kara Walker’s recent turn to public sculpture, and the connections she draws between the rawness of slavery's memory in the US and the UK.

Research, Talks

Whole in the part: medieval experiments in transcendence

5:30pm, 11 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join Dr Anya Burgon for a talk introducing the phenomenon of downscaled worlds in late-medieval culture – from the many images of the salvator mundi with the world in his hands, to prayer nuts, to the ‘atomic’ prayers of the Cloud of Unknowing, and s...

Lecture, Research

Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction

5:30pm, 19 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join author Stephanie O'Rourke for a panel discussion with professors John Tresch and Susan Siegfried to mark the launch of O'Rourke's major new book, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction: Europe and its Colonial Networks, 1780-1850 (Chicago U...

Research

Robert Barry – The Defining of It…

6:00pm, 19 Mar 2026 | Free, booking essential

Join author Mathieu Copeland for a conversation with Professor Sarah Wilson, marking the launch of Copeland’s new book "Robert Barry – The Defining of It…", the first comprehensive monograph to explore the complete body of work by one of contemporary...

Citations