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.

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.

Amanda will be presenting a paper entitled "Dirty Father Thames" and the Microscopic Grotesque: Cholera and Water after John Snow at the Northern Nineteenth-Century Network's Water Conference at Leeds Trinity University next month.

We are pleased to announce that Carlo Avilio has passed his viva voce examination for his dissertation on the subject of Naturalism and the Picaresque in Jusepe de Ribera's Work supervised by Dr Lorenzo Pericolo. The photograph shows Carlo with internal examiner Professor Michael Hatt.

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow Amanda Sciampacone was invited to speak about applying for the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in a workshop on Research Grants held at the School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London. The event took place on March 1st.

Going round in circles: a problem for colour theory.

Since the early eighteenth century, painters have used the colour wheel, and related diagrams, to predict how colours will mix, to organise them in graduated sequences and contrasting pairs, and to arrange them in harmonious combinations. Artists, along with scientists and philosophers, have also used colour diagrams to set out the relations possible between colours, or the full variety colour can assume. But, although such diagrams are powerful heuristic and logical tools, they embody some significant misconceptions, and create a good deal of confusion, about colour. Drawing on arguments put forward by the philosopher, Wittgenstein, this paper will examine how they fudge or misrepresent the phenomenology, categorisation, and ‘space’ of colour – and the consequences of their doing so for art.

Open to all, free admission.

Thursday 23rd February 2017

5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Research Forum Seminar Room, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN

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