Professor Tracy E. Cooper (Temple University, Philadelphia) to deliver lecture on The Last Dogaressa: Material Presence, Gender, and Elite Identity in Early Modern Venice.

Alumni, friends and former staff are gathering in Venice this weekend to celebrate 40 years of teaching History of Art in Venice. Special events include tours and talks led by current and former staff, a careers session led by our alumni for current students, and an evening reception for all at the Warwick Palazzo. Our alumni can see more about this event on the Facebook group page: Warwick History of Art Alumni.

What happens when fine artists engage with architecture and urban space? What forms can such engagements take? What political issues arise at the junctures between these disciplines?

During the modern period, when artists and critics have often complained that fine art is overly remote from everyday life, one common way of overcoming this gap has been to draw on the greater social efficacy that architecture can seem to provide. However, in other instances artists have used their relatively autonomous position to criticise or interrupt the relationship between architecture, urbanisation and power.

This conference will explore these issues as they arise in practices spanning the period from the 1960s to the present, exploring intersections between art, architecture and urbanism both within and outside Europe and North America.

Organised by Bill Roberts, Teaching Fellow, History of Art.

Artists' Critical Interventions into Architecture and Urbanism,

History of Art Research Fellow Amanda Sciampacone will be convening an academic session in Edinburgh this Saturday. Air and the Visual seeks to investigate the relationship between air and representation, and to address issues of the visible in the invisible and the material in the immaterial. Find out MORE.

Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology: a day seminar in celebration of the work of Dr Richard K. Morris

Richard Morris (1943- 2015) lectured at the University of Warwick in the Department of History of Art for 27 years during which time he taught countless students and demonstrated his breadth of knowledge in architectural analysis. He is best known for his work on the Middle Ages and his creation of the unique 10,000 item strong mouldings archive. This conference will celebrate the work and contribution of Richard Morris through an exploration of topics, themes and places that were of particular relevance to his core interests by his contemporaries, those whom he taught and influenced and new scholars reassessing the architecture of the late Middle Ages. It will present new research with an aim of sparking fresh debate and, in line with Richard’s own greatest passion, to enable a wide range of scholars and students to participate in active and positive exchange.

This conference has been organised by

• The British Archaeological Association
• The Ancient Monuments Society
• The Courtauld Institute of Art

Saturday 20 February 2016 - 9:45 am - 6:00 pm

Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN. 

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.

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.

History of Art PhD student, Stefano Colombo, has been awarded a Royal Historical Society conference travel grant. The grant will allow him to deliver a presentation at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Berlin, 26-28 March 2015. The title of the presentation is “The Commemorative Monument of the Fini Family in San Moisè: Strategies of Self-Promotion and Social Affirmation in Seventeenth-Century Venice".

Dr Karen Lang took part in a live discussion on the BBC Radio 3 programme Free Thinking on 9th October.

'Tim Marlow, Karen Lang, and Daniel Johnson discuss reading history through the paintings of Kiefer and Polke ahead of next month's 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.'

Hear the Podcast on the BBC Radio Three web site.