Three Warwick graduates have been back to work on the Pontigny project with Dr Jenny Alexander of the History of Art department and Prof. Terryl Kinder of Pontigny. Rosie Harris Adamson and Lucy Henderson were awarded scholarships for the URSS Pontigny Project in 2011 and they were joined by Agatha Gomolka, a MA student from the department, who is now working on her PhD. Another Pontigny Project team member, Roo Alexander-Jones, the team's film maker, who graduated from Oxford Brookes university last summer, completed the team.

The team was trying out some new equipment derived from the optics used by bird-watchers and for the first time it was possible to find and record the marks made by the stonemasons who built the vaults high up in the building. The results are now being processed, but it is already clear that the team's work has provided vital new evidence about the relationship between the high vaults and the main stucture of the building, and this will resolve a long-standing question about Cistercian builders and their place in early-Gothic architecture.

The project will study the painting of the American artist Philip Guston’s last decade, 1970 to 1980, when he turned from an abstract to a figurative mode. It will demonstrate how his art opens an expanded concept of allegory and it will show what the academic discipline of the History of Art stands to gain from an understanding of allegory from a renewed perspective. In addition to allegory, the study will introduce the concepts of the untimely, the inexpressive and the transmission of tradition, which have the potential to complicate and invigorate our understanding of modernism and history. The project will run for three years from 01/10/2014 to 30/09/2017.

Dias, Rosie (2013) Exhibiting Englishness : John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and the formation of a national aesthetic. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

In his introduction to the Biennale, the artistic director Rolando Bellini quotes from Dr Karen Lang's book Chaos and the Cosmos: on the Image in Aesthetics and Art History: "Of note, in her afterword, Toward an Aesthetic Way of Knowing, Lang affirms that 'the aesthetic object remains a stubbornly ethical presence in the age of capitalism'."

Karen Lang delivers her conference paper: Ethics and the Void in the Art of Anish Kapoor.

Conference: Neo-Humanism: Art, Ethics, and Aesthetics at the Dawn of the new Millennium - In Memory of Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti. Date: 3 December 2013. Location: Salone dei Cinquecento, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.

30th November 2013. Professor Louise Campbell gives the keynote lecture, From Coventry to Canterbury: raids, ruins, politics, pilgrims, at the Twentieth Century Society/DOCOMO conference Sacred Spaces in Modern Britain.

A two day conference on 15 and 16 November at the Warwick teaching and research centre in Venice held in partnership with our Venice partners, Ca' Foscari through the Scuola dottorale interateneo in Storia delle Arti.

Two events at the Palazzo Pesaro Papafava in Venice taking place over 25-26 October 2013.

PhD student Giorgia Mancini has published in The Burlington Magazine.