Research Events

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/

The major international exhibition co-curated by Michael Hatt of the Department of History of Art has travelled from the United States to London, and opens today at Tate Britain.

Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837-1901 has been organised by the Yale Center for British Art, in partnership with Tate Britain. See earlier news item.

We were saddened to hear of the death of former colleague Dr Richard Morris, Research Associate and Reader in History of Art from 1974 until 2001.

Richard was an architectural historian and buildings archaeologist who played a significant role in the establishment of the department and its international reputation for the architectural history of England during the middle ages and the early modern period. He developed the Warwick Mouldings Archive, a paper archive of full-size moulding profiles from numerous standing structures and some archaeological collections, mainly in England and Wales. His recent publications covered such sites as Chepstow Castle, Coventry St Mary’s Cathedral Priory, Eynsham Abbey, Kenilworth Castle, Sherborne Abbey, Stoneleigh Abbey, Tewkesbury Abbey and Tintern Abbey.

Memories and Tributes

The History of Art department’s status as one of the country’s leading departments has been confirmed by the results of the Research Excellence Framework.

The REF assesses the quality of each department’s research, as well as the public impact of that research, and the environment in which it is undertaken.

The department was 2nd for publications awarded the highest rating of 4* or ‘world-leading’, with 46% of our publications rated as world-leading.

For 4* ratings across all aspects of the REF, we were the 4th placed History of Art department.
 
According to the Research Fortnight Quality Index, Warwick was ranked 6th overall for History of Art.