Research Events

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.

WARWICK AWARDS FOR TEACHING EXCELLENCE 2017. Congratulations to Ann Haughton for her commendation award (£2000) announced yesterday. The awards recognise staff who have enhanced and transformed the student learning experience, with nominations invited from students and staff across the University.

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.

Dr. Alice Eden has begun the Enchanted Community collaborative art project in Coventry and Leamington! The project kicked off with a well-received talk at Leamington Spa Art Gallery on Friday 12th May followed by a family workshop on Saturday 27th May. This series of public engagement workshops, outreach sessions and talks will culminate in an art exhibition in Coventry created by local residents, school children, local artist Holly Dawes and Alice Eden. Please see the project website for more details. This work is supported by Professor Michael Hatt, History of Art and the Institute of Advanced Study, Warwick.

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".

We have been rated as one of the top three departments teaching History of Art in the country. The rankings are based on official data collected by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) and the National Student Survey (NSS). Find out more in the Guardian University Guide 2018.

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.