ART, INC. : The Corporation in Art History

Matthew C. Hunter teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. Trained in studio art, he is interested making and knowing at the conjunctions of art with science and technology, broadly conceived. Hunter is author of Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object (2020) and Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (2013), both published by University of Chicago Press. He is an editor of Grey Room.

Edward Christie is a Research and Engagement Fellow at the St Andrews Centre for Critical Sustainabilities (StACCS) – an inter- and transdisciplinary global research centre that aims to enrich and reorient debates around sustainability beyond ‘just’ the environment and technology to include its social, political, and cultural dimensions. Previously, he was an Associate Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at the School of Art History at St Andrews. His current research project, ‘The Art of Oil: Modernism and the Rise of the Petroleum Industry’, investigates the relationship between the development of the oil sector and modernist aesthetics.

Jill Ingrassia-Zingales is an executive leader in visual communications working with private collections in formal third-space collaborations. Jill ideated and implemented the Art Program at the David Rubenstein Forum at the University of Chicago. This program debuted the first exhibition of selections from the Kenneth C. Griffin Collection. In 2018, Jill earned her MA in Art History from the University of Chicago. Before her return to academia, she spent her twentyyear marketing career in executive leadership roles. Applying her strategic marketing expertise to her research, Jill explores how disruption occurs in the evolution of art in our culture when deviation from conventional modes of exhibiting and collecting drives inquiry.

Iris Moon is responsible for European ceramics and glass, alongside curatorial work at The Met, where she recently curated the exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (2025), she is the author of Melancholy Wedgwood (2024) and Luxury after the Terror (2022), and co-editor with Richard Taws of Time, Media and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France (2021). She earned her PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Stephanie Dieckvoss is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Courtauld Institute, University of London. She previously taught, amongst others, at Central Saint Martins (UAL) and Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Stephanie’s research concentrates on contemporary art markets, especially collecting practices, art fairs, and spaces of commerce. Her PhD, Do-It-Yourself: Alternative Art Fairs of the 1990s and Their Spaces in Europe and the USA, is currently being developed into a book. She is an established journalist specialising in contemporary art market dynamics. In a previous career, Stephanie held senior positions in commercial galleries and art fairs across Europe and the USA.

Myrna Nader is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Art History at the American University of Beirut (AUB) teaching courses on religion and art. She completed my PhD at Brunel University, London, and at AUB, she was Research Associate and Research Affiliate in the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) and Women and Gender Studies, respectively, before taking up her current position. Her work on medieval and modern literature and image-making has appeared in various publications including Religion and the Arts (RART) and Altre Modernità.

Liza Oliver is associate professor of art history and affiliate faculty of South Asia studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Art, Trade, and Imperialism in Early Modern French India (2019), which analyses the integration of the French East India Company with the eighteenth-century textile industries of India’s southeast coast. Her current book project entitled, “Technocratic Seeing: Photography, Ecology, and Famine in Colonial India,” examines how photographs aided in the constitution of British colonial policies around famine, land, and agricultural labor. An article on this research was recently published in the Art Bulletin.

Lindsey Reynolds is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at Southern Methodist University, with research interests in artistic networking, experimental print, and political action in the latter half of the twentieth century. Her dissertation, “Action Requested, Please Respond: Transnational Mail Art Networks and the Ethics of Exile, 1968-1995,” responds to questions of authorship, censorship, and distribution in publications co-produced by artists-in-exile and international correspondents. Reynolds holds a BA from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA from the University of Houston, and has worked as a researcher, writer, and curator at museums throughout the state.

David Bellingham is Programme Director for the MA in Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. He leads core units including Professional Practice, alongside the elective The Market for Antiquities & Old Masters. His research spans art market ethics, collecting practices in antiquity, and reception of classical art in the modern era. He is editor of A Cultural History of Collecting: Antiquity (Bloomsbury forthcoming) and author of papers on Botticelli, Frans Hals, and art fairs. Recent work includes contributions to Sotheby’s market reports and scholarly papers on Roman collecting and display.

Victor Morgan is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of East Anglia’s School of History and Art History. His research focuses on early modern English history, with specializations in family/household dynamics, East Anglian regional history, and the cultural and social dimensions of art and architecture.

Tobah Aukland-Peck is an art historian specialising in twentieth-century Britain. Her research addresses the intersection of art, industry, and environment, and includes inquiries into the visual history of extraction, the industrial provenance of artistic materials, images of pollution, and the resonance between artistic and industrial labor. Tobah’s book project, “Mineral Landscapes: British Art and Extraction, 1937-1975,” argues that resource extraction, and its attendant issues of pollution, materiality, and labor, provided a rich subject matter for post-war British artists, who were interested in integrating the nation’s changing landscapes and workplaces into an increasingly abstract practice. She demonstrates that the multi-media objects that resulted from these encounters insisted on the pictorial relevance of labor, class, and environmental degradation, critical contemporary issues that continue to resist easy representation.