The Research Forum invites you to the much-anticipated Third Year PhD Symposium of 2019/20, a two-day online conference showcasing the innovative, transhistorical and transregional research of Courtauld students in the final stages of their doctoral degrees. Each year, this event proves a highlight of The Courtauld’s calendar of events — a coming together of faculty, students, and the general public in collegiate celebration of the Institute’s rising academics and their research. The events of 2020 have led to a particularly extraordinary programme of papers this year. Following the global pandemic’s disruption of academic and social gatherings and networks, it is our pleasure to host the first ever online iteration of the symposium, presenting research produced in unprecedented circumstances. The conference’s online nature allows for a particularly broad and international group of participants and viewers. Accordingly, the panels have been organised to facilitate unusual groupings of topics, places, and periods, moving across conventional intradisciplinary divisions to collide medieval and modern, plastic and virtual, and virgins and parasites.
Programme:
DAY 1 – Thursday 8th October
Introduction
Panel 1: Bodies
Andrew Cummings — ‘The Promise of Parasites: Dew Kim’s Latrinxia: A New Utopia’
Alice Zamboni — ‘The anatomy of statues in Jan de Bisschop’s Signorum veterum Icones (The Hague, 1668)’
Sophie Guo — ‘Palaeontology of the Present: The ‘Roots of Life’ in Li Shan’s Genetic Art’
Break
Panel 2: Scientific Frameworks
Emma Merkling — ‘Self as Boundless Surface: Ether and Alternative Geometries in Evelyn De Morgan’s Portrait of her Husband (1909)’
Ambra D’Antone — ‘Aleppo 1940-1954: A Laboratory of Surrealism’
LUNCH
Panel 3: Spectacle
Leah Gouget-Levy — ‘Fashion reportage at the races: the spectacular temporality of fashion through the lens of the Séeberger Frères’
Emily Christensen — ‘Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings as colonialist objects: stereotypes and human zoos’
Nico Flory — ‘“prostrate on the ground”: The Magdalene at the Cartuja de Miraflores’
Break
‘In Conversation’ Panel: Art History’s Futures
Panellists: Dr Scott Nethersole, Dr Tom Nickson, Professor Caroline Arscott and members of the Third Year PhD cohort
An open conversation between the conference’s speakers and a panel of Courtauld academics reflecting on the day’s papers and discussing key issues facing art history today. The panel provides a platform for a collective and expansive working-through of art history’s pedagogies, methodologies, and political and ethical responsibilities; a place to reflect on and discuss art history’s role in the humanities and society more broadly and to generate strategies for art historians going forward.
DAY 2 – Friday 9th October
Introductory remarks
Panel 1: Art Work
Madeleine Harrison — ‘Plantation Futures: Aaron Douglas’ Aspects of Negro Life’
Harry Prance — ‘Gilding the Lily? Guilds, Gilt and Medieval Material Naivety’
Eowyn Kerr-Di Carlo — ‘The cartolai connection: assessing the artistic networks of Florentine manuscript production at the turn of the fifteenth century’
Break
Panel 2: Person, Symbol, Power
Ana-Maria Milčić — ‘D’Annunzio’s Fiume at the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution: Mystical Appropriations’
Charlotte Wytema — ‘An Immaculate Image? The role of prints in the dissemination of the Virgin with Fifteen Symbols iconography’
Janet O’Brien — ‘Body Translated: Nādir Shāh of Iran, King of India’
LUNCH
Panel 3: Sites
Lorne Darnell — ‘Climatology and Civic Identity in the Topographical Tradition of Seventeenth-Century Haarlem’
Erica Payet — ‘The Unseen Gulf Wars: 2003 re-writings of the 1991 Persian Gulf War’
June Geddes — ‘Letter from Romania: ‘cultural exchanges’ in and between Scotland and Romania during the Cold War’
Break
‘In Conversation’ Panel: Art History’s Communities
Panellists: Dr Sussan Babaie, Dr Thomas Hughes, Dr Esther Chadwick, and members of the Third Year PhD cohort
An open conversation between the conference’s speakers and a panel of Courtauld academics reflecting on the day’s papers and discussing key issues facing art history today. The panel provides a platform for a collective and expansive working-through of art history’s pedagogies, methodologies, and political and ethical responsibilities; a place to reflect on and discuss art history’s role in the humanities and society more broadly and to generate strategies for art historians going forward.
Closing remarks