Professor Michael Hatt has co-organised an event about the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen and Britain, which will take place at the Danish Academy in Rome and the British School at Rome next week. The seminar, convened with Lene Østermark-Johansen from the University of Copenhagen and Margrethe Floryan from Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen, brings together scholars from Denmark, Britain, Italy and the United States.

Professor Michael Rosenthal will speak on 'Augustus Earle: Seeing Straight' at the Tate Britain conference Artist and Empire: New Dynamics which begins this week.

Tate Britain’s major conference marks the opening of the exhibition Artist and Empire. Scholars, curators and artists from around Britain and the world consider art created under the conditions of the British Empire, its aftermath, and its future in museum and gallery displays.

Recent PhD graduate and WATE award winner Ann Haughton has an article in the latest edition of Exchanges: the Warwick Research Journal. The article, 'Myths of Male Same-Sex Love in the Art of the Italian Renaissance', can be read online in the Exchanges journal.

Reference: Exchanges: the Warwick Research Journal, [S.l.], v. 3, n. 1, p. 65-95, sep. 2015. ISSN 2053-9665.

Congratulations to Matteo Carpiniello, Fabio Franz and Delia Moldovan on securing CADRE funding for their PhD studies.

The Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence for Postgraduate Research students (WATE PGR) give students and staff the opportunity to celebrate excellent teaching by postgraduate research students. The award recognises teachers who have motivated, inspired and engaged their students, and created a supportive learning environment.

Ann has made an exceptional impact on our students’ learning experience at first and second year level... she excels in transforming the tough and the dull in academia into the understandable and the enjoyable. As the most recent comments from first-year evaluations reveal, she inspires, encourages, and builds student confidence particularly in seminars.

The Study Abroad Team will be holding four open information sessions this term. Places are limited to 150. To find out more about the sessions and book a seat go to the Study Abroad Events Calendar.

RETHINKING ALLEGORY
The Warburg Institute
30 October 2015

Over the past several decades allegory has emerged as a prominent subject across a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Allegory is all that traditional scholarship has said it is: a rhetorical figure, a mode of literary and artistic representation, a religious as well as secular hermeneutic practice. It is, however, much more than that: a protean cultural force which has left a deep imprint on the Western tradition, and whose full impact is only beginning to come to light. Hosted by the Warburg Institute, one of the key sites for the study of the allegorical tradition, this colloquium aims to showcase some of the most exciting research in contemporary allegory studies and further the vibrant current debate on the subject.

Keynote: Brenda Machosky (University of Hawai'i - West O'ahu). Speakers: Andreas Beyer (University of Basel), Matthias Bruhn (Humboldt University, Berlin), Jason Crawford (Union University), Anthony Ossa-Richardson (Queen Mary, University of London), Kristen Poole (University of Delaware), Michael Silk (King's College, University of London).

Organisers: Karen Lang (Warwick) and Vladimir Brljak (Cambridge).

Visit the conference web page for more information.

Members of the Department have worked with Compton Verney and the Hart Silversmith Trust to create a new exhibition: The Hart Silversmiths: A Living Tradition. The exhibition explores the work of silversmith George Henry Hart (1882-1973) and three generations of the Hart family, all of whom continue Arts and Crafts traditions. Much of the research for the exhibition was carried out by Dr. Sarah Walford and undergraduate student Pip Shergold. The exhibition is related to the research project Ashbee and After: Drawing in the Silversmiths’ Workshop, directed by Professor Michael Hatt. The exhibition closes 13th September 2015.

Closing date: 1st May 2015.

Professor Paul Smith has been awarded a summer fellowship at the Clark Institute in Williamstown to pursue research into pictorial syntax, or how we construct the immaterial, virtual image in a picture from the material marks on its surface.

Congratulations to Philip Zidarov, an MA student in the department, who has won a scholarship from the Cini Foundation in Venice to pursue research at the Vittore Branca International Center for Studies of Italian Culture. Philip’s project, Visual Documents of Two Volcanic Eruptions: The Journeys of Images, examines the use and re-use of images of Etna and Vesuvius by artists, engravers, and printers through the 17th and 18th centuries.

English Heritage has just added the churches of St John Willenhall and St Chad Wood End to its listed buildings register. With the recent listing of St Oswald Tile Hill (added to list in October 2014) this means that all of Basil Spence’s churches in Coventry are now protected.

They were nominated by Louise Campbell, supported by the Twentieth Century Society.
In assessing them, English Heritage’s inspector drew heavily on research done in 2004-8 by the Basil Spence project team based at Warwick http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/arthistory/research/projects/basil_spence 

The Minister’s decision about whether to list Spence’s Hyde Park Cavalry Barracks in London is now pending – see
http://www.c20society.org.uk/news/concern-over-the-fate-of-hyde-park-barracks/