Nicola Viviani has published the book Mail Art Stories: the mail artist tells his own story, in collaboration with the mail artist Lancilotto Bellini. The book records a project conceived by Bellini in the mid-1990s, which collected work from mail artists around the world. This is the first time the project and the works it generated have been published.

Nicola will be joining the department as a PhD student in 2017-18, and will be writing his thesis on collector, patron, publisher and collaborator Francesco Conz, one of the most influential figures in the late-twentieth century neo-avant-garde art world.

We are very pleased to announce Olga Smith's arrival in September as a WIRL-COFUND Research (Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Leadership Programme) Fellow. For this prestigious two-year award Olga will develop her project on the politics and aesthetics of photographic representations of landscape in Europe in the contemporary period.

Dr Alice Eden presented a paper entitled ‘Frederick Cayley Robinson: Paintings of Life, Death and Still Life’ at this year's conference organised by the British Association of Modernist Studies (BAMS). The conference on the theme of Modernist Life was held at the University of Birmingham earlier this month.

History of Art Department Research Fellow Amanda Sciampacone will be presenting a paper entitled 'Climatology, Medicine, and Scientific Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Britain' on 6 July 2017 at the Mediating Climate Change conference at the University of Leeds.

Emeritus Professor Louise Campbell will be giving a paper on Sussex University on 15 June at the Oxford Brookes conference 'Architecture Citizenship Space: British Architecture from the 1920s to the 1970s'. The paper is entiltled "'A background sympathetic to young and energetic minds': forming modern citizens at the University of Sussex".

During May, Lorenzo Pericolo has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Freie Universität, Berlin, working with the research group BildEvidenz. History and Aesthetics. The Fellowship ran from May 9th to May 16th 2017.

On May 20th, Amanda Sciampacone will be presenting a paper on '"Injurious Impregnations of the Air": Medical Climatology in the Victorian Visual Imagination' at the NAVSA/AVSA conference to be held at Villa La Pietra in Florence.

Professionalization Workshop. 15th to 17th and 21st May.

On the 26th of April 2017, Art History PhD student and lutenist Adam Busiakiewicz presented a public talk on Ter Brugghen's Lute Player at the National Gallery in London.

The lute was used by painters to express various ideas in their works, apart from the obvious allusions to harmony and discord. The musical associations with Orpheus, the melter-of-hearts, would not have been lost on the contemporary audience of this painting. Various symbolic links to notions of youth, flippancy and the transience of life and worldly pleasures are also all associated with the mythology of the instrument and its music. Paintings such as Ter Brugghen’s Lutenist allow us to open up a world of understanding how music was appreciated and consumed in the past.

The talk was accompanied by several live performances of lute music relevant to the period and themes of the painting.

Louise Campbell has been awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship for 2017-19 to prepare a book for publication called Studio lives: artists at home and at work in twentieth-century Britain.

Rosie Dias has contributed to the British Library’s research project, Picturing Places, recently published as a web-based resource exploring the Library’s vast topographical collections. Her two articles, “Recording and Representing India: The East India Company’s Landscape Practices” and “A Map of Kolkata in 1785” draw upon her current research on the East India Company and visual culture, and focus upon works in the British Library’s India Office Collection and King’s Topographical Collection.

Amanda Sciampacone will be presenting a paper on '"Animalized Atmospheres": Climatology and Disease in Victorian Britain' tomorrow at the Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar (MIVSS) on Victorians and the Environment to be held at Birmingham City University. The MIVSS is a group for scholars working on any aspect of nineteenth-century culture in the Midlands. MIVSS meets twice a year to have a day of themed discussion and to share research.

Dr.Jenny Alexander (Warwick) and project partner Professor Terryl Kinder (Pontigny) have taken a break from their fieldwork at Pontigny Abbey church to give an interview to local radio station France Bleu Auxerre. The team are continuing their study of masons' marks at this Cistercian building, a project which is providing valuable information about the history of the building as well as exploring a significant new method of research.