Edit 'People' summaries - History of Art

01 Tagliaferro, Giorgio

Dr Giorgio Tagliaferro

Reader

Head of History of Art

Email: g.tagliaferro@warwick.ac.uk
Room: 5.68, Faculty of Arts Building

Research interests: Renaissance and Early Modern art, especially Italian and Venetian; visual arts and the display of power; arts and spectatorship; painting and beholding; art criticism; drawing and creative process; artists’ workshops; devotional practice and visual culture; patronage and artistic production.

02Dias, Rosie

Professor Rosie Dias

Co-Head of School of Creative Arts, Peformance and Visual Cultures

Professor in History of Art

Email: rosemarie.dias@warwick.ac.uk

Room: 5.67 Faculty of Arts Building

Research interests: eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British art and visual culture; colonial art, particularly in India; British artists in Venice.

a Ajmar, Marta

Dr Marta Ajmar

Associate Professor
Director of Research

Email: Marta.Ajmar@warwick.ac.uk
Room: 5.65, Faculty of Arts Building

Research interests: Renaissance and Early Modern material culture; Artisanal knowledge and craft technology in the global Renaissance; Contemporary regenerative design, making and craft; Learning through making and experiential pedagogies.

a Alexander, Jenny

Professor Jenny Alexander

Professor
Admissions Tutor (autumn and spring 2024/25)

Email: jennifer.s.alexander@warwick.ac.uk
Room: 5.66, Faculty of Arts Building

Research interests: medieval art and architecture especially the study of medieval and early modern buildings, their construction and use.

a Botton, Jim

Jim Botton

Teaching Fellow

Email: J.Botton@warwick.ac.uk

Faculty of Arts Building
University of Warwick

a Bourdua, Louise

Professor Louise Bourdua

Professor
Venice Convenor

Email: l.bourdua@warwick.ac.uk
Room: 5.58, Faculty of Arts Building

Research interests: artistic patronage, religious orders and intersections between the Veneto and Northern Europe in the later middle ages and Renaissance.

a Cane, Jonathan

Dr Jonathan Cane

Assistant Professor

Exams Officer

Email: jonathan.e.cane@warwick.ac.uk

Room: FAB5.59, Faculty of Arts Building

Research Interests: Modern and contemporary art and architecture from the Global South; environmental and oceanic humanities; natural history collections and herbaria; urban history of Sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil; queer theory and critical STS

a Hatt, Michael

Professor Michael Hatt

Professor

Director of Graduate Studies

Email: m.hatt@warwick.ac.uk
Room: 5.60, Faculty of Arts Building

Research interests: nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art in Denmark, Britain, and the USA; sex, gender and sexuality; race, racism and colonialism; sculpture and the sculptural.

a Kocialkowska, Kamila

Dr Kamila Kociałkowska

Assistant Professor

Tel: +44 (0)24 76 23622
Email: kamila.kocialkowska@warwick.ac.uk

FAB 5.70

Research interests: Art and culture of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Empire; theories of modernism; socialist realism; abstract art; printmaking and print culture; new censorship studies; surveillance studies; new materialist methodologies

a Roberts, Richenda

Dr Richenda Roberts

Teaching Fellow

Email: R.Roberts.6@warwick.ac.uk

Room 5.62, Faculty of Arts Building

Research interests: The representation of modern and contemporary war and pacifism in visual and material culture.

British art, design and architecture produced during the period 1840-1940, especially in relation to practices of magic, occultism and spiritualism. Decolonisation of the Western art canon. Curatorial practices. The development, implementation and evaluation of novel methodologies

a Saumarez Smith, Otto

Dr Otto Saumarez Smith

Associate Professor

Email: Otto.Saumarez-smith@warwick.ac.uk

Room: 5.69, Faculty of Arts Building

Research Interests: architectural practices; post-war university architecture; leisure centres; inner cities; shopping centres; the workings of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government.

a Smith, Paul

Professor Paul Smith

Professorial Fellow

Email: paul.g.smith@warwick.ac.uk
Room: 5.62 Faculty of Arts Building

Research interests: nineteenth-century French painting, art theory, criticism, and literature, especially Baudelaire, Manet, Impressionism, Seurat, Cézanne, and stories about art. Wittgenstein's aesthetics, and the writings of Adrian Stokes and Richard Wollheim. The phenomenology and neuroscience of visual experience and art. Colour, colour theory, especially George Field, and colour diagrams.

a Vogt, Naomi

Dr Naomi Vogt

Associate Professor

Admissions Tutor (from Summer Term 2025)

Mead Gallery Liaison Officer

Email: naomi.vogt@warwick.ac.uk

Room: 5.70, Faculty of Arts Building

Research interests: Art and visual culture of the 20th and 21st century; moving image within history; documentary practices; the post-internet; visual anthropology; video installation; rituals; the circulation of tropes and iconographies; art and knowledge.

a Walford, Sarah

Dr Sarah Walford

Assistant Professor (Teaching Focused)

Director of Undergraduate Studies

Email: sarah.walford@warwick.ac.uk

Room: 5.61, Faculty of Arts Building

Research interests: the life and career of Coventry's first City Architect, Sir Donald Gibson, and Coventry's pioneering role in post-war public sector architecture.

c Baker, Sharon

Sharon Baker

Associate Tutor

Email: Sharon.Baker@warwick.ac.uk

c Lupi, Livia

Dr Livia Lupi

Associate Tutor

Email: livia.lupi@warwick.ac.uk
History of Art Academic Studio, Level 5, Faculty of Arts Building

Research interests: late-medieval and Renaissance painting and architecture, especially in Italy; representations of architecture in the arts; frescoes; rhetoric and its interplay with the visual arts; architectural drawings; painter-architect figures.

c Towler, Lucinda

Lucinda Towler

Associate Tutor

dEllmer, Thomas

Thomas Ellmer

Exhibitions Curator, Mead Gallery

dShalgosky, Sarah

Sarah Shalgosky

Associate Lecturer
Curator of the Mead Gallery and the University of Warwick collection

Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre
warwickartscentre.co.uk/mead-gallery

eCampbell, Louise

Professor Louise Campbell

Emeritus Professor

Email: l.e.m.campbell@warwick.ac.uk

Research interests: late nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, especially modern British architecture, public art in the post-war period, and the artist's studio.

eGardner, Julian

Professor Julian Gardner

Emeritus Professor

Email: julian.gardner@warwick.ac.uk

Following his retirement in 2008 he was appointed as an Emeritus Professor in the Department. In 2014 he was also appointed as an Honorary Professor in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance where he acts as an advisor to the Director, and as a mentor for their postgraduate and doctoral members.

e Rosenthal, Michael

Professor Michael Rosenthal

Emeritus Professor

Email: m.j.rosenthal@warwick.ac.uk

f.1 Dinu, Monica

Monica Dinu

UG Programmes Officer

Email: SCAPVCenquiries@warwick.ac.uk
Room: 2.50, Faculty of Arts Building

f.1 Watkins, Paula

Paula Watkins

Senior Programme Co-ordinator covering PG Programmes Officer

Email: SCAPVCenquiries@warwick.ac.uk

Room: 2.50, Faculty of Arts Building

f.2 Ho, Chau

Chau Ho

Academic Administrator

Email: C.Ho.1@warwick.ac.uk

Room: 2.50, Faculty of Arts Building

g1 McVey, Tracey

Tracey McVey

Department Administrator - Student Experience

Email: T.A.Bale@warwick.ac.uk

Room: 2.50, Faculty of Arts Building

g2 Shute, Sarah

Sarah Shute

Department Administrator - Finance and HR

Email: Sarah.Shute@warwick.ac.uk

Room: 2.50, Faculty of Arts Building

g3 Nicholls, Claire

Claire Nicholls

Senior Department Administrator

Email: Claire.Nicholls@warwick.ac.uk

Room: 2.50, Faculty of Arts Building

g4 Cassidy, Clara

Clara Cassidy

Senior Executive Assistant

Email: clara.cassidy@warwick.ac.uk

Room 2.50 Faculty of Arts Building

g4 Huning, Nathalie

Nathalie Huning

Executive Assistant

Email: SCAPVCenquiries@warwick.ac.uk

Room: 2.50, Faculty of Arts Building

g Calvert, Andy

Andy Calvert

Subject Librarian for History of Art

Email: Andrew.Calvert@warwick.ac.uk

g O'Donoghue, Ian

Ian O'Donoghue

Technical Supervisor

Email: SCAPVCtechteam@warwick.ac.uk

Room: 2.51, Faculty of Arts Building

h Clémence, Couriet Bossan

Clémence Couriet Bossan

Thesis: The life and career of French art dealer Georges Petit (1856–1920)

Supervisor: Professor Paul Smith

In nineteenth-century France, the exhibition of art underwent profound transformation. Alongside the official Salon emerged alternative Salons, World’s Fairs, artist-led exhibitions and shows organised by private dealers, as galleries assumed an increasingly important role within a previously highly institutionalised art world. Georges Petit was a leading figure in this new landscape, famously described by Émile Zola as a 'dandy, very chic', determined to 'ruin the Goupil firm, to surpass Brame, to be the first'. Despite his prominence, Petit has received limited sustained scholarly attention, particularly regarding the later phase of his career, which culminated in the auction of his possessions after his death in 1920. This research reassesses Petit’s career and examines the broader role of art dealers in shaping what art is exhibited, valued and ultimately collected

h Coleman, Adam

Adam Coleman

Email: Adam.Coleman@warwick.ac.uk

Thesis title: Modernities on Sea: Planning, Peripherality and the Future of the British Seaside, 1940–1980

Supervisor: Dr Otto Saumarez Smith (Department of History of Art) & Professor Mathew Thomson (Department of History)

Research Description: My research examines how postwar British seaside towns were imagined, planned, and governed as anomalous urban forms at the edge of modern Britain. Drawing on original archival sources, it argues that these towns became analytically generative spaces in which the contradictions and unevenness of postwar urban modernity were particularly visible, revealing the limits of planning orthodoxies and the uneven reach of the modern state. Positioned at the intersection of architectural, cultural, and local history, the project reframes the postwar seaside as a peripheral and productive landscape through which to rethink urban modernity in twentieth-century Britain

h Couriet-Bossan, Clemence

Clemence Couriet-Bossan

Email: Clemence.Couriet-Bossan@warwick.ac.uk

Thesis title: The life and career of French art dealer Georges Petit (1856–1920)

Supervisor: Professor Paul Smith

Research Description: In nineteenth-century France, the exhibition of art underwent profound transformation. Alongside the official Salon emerged alternative Salons, World’s Fairs, artist-led exhibitions and shows organised by private dealers, as galleries assumed an increasingly important role within a previously highly institutionalised art world. Georges Petit was a leading figure in this new landscape, famously described by Émile Zola as a 'dandy, very chic', determined to 'ruin the Goupil firm, to surpass Brame, to be the first'. Despite his prominence, Petit has received limited sustained scholarly attention, particularly regarding the later phase of his career, which culminated in the auction of his possessions after his death in 1920. This research reassesses Petit’s career and examines the broader role of art dealers in shaping what art is exhibited, valued and ultimately collected

h Flavell, Ella

Ella Flavell

Email: Ella.Flavell@warwick.ac.uk

Thesis title: Living Roots– Art Brut Within and Without the Western Art World, 1930-1988

Supervisor: Dr Naomi Vogt and Prof Hilary Marland

Research Description: Art Brut, produced by psychiatric patients, 'isolated' individuals, and the self-taught, has long found itself excluded from the art historical canon upon which it had such a profound impact. Offering a visual language seemingly untainted by 'cultural conditioning,' Art Brut played a key role in the development of avant-gardes on both sides of the Atlantic. Framed by the collections of Jean Dubuffet, André Breton, and Alain Bourbonnais, my project asks how an idea of Art Brut was constructed, adopted, and exploited within modernist circles. It questions and challenges the ways in which Art Brut has been historicised, asking how the canonical, Western narrative of modern art changes when these practices are reassessed. In doing so my project aims to demonstrate that rather than an anonymous adjunct to such narratives, Art Brut occupied a pivotal and essential position within them

h Gawaya, Timothy

Timothy Gawaya

Email: Timothy.Gawaya@warwick.ac.uk

Thesis title: Brutal Positivism: A Theory of the Autonomous Digital Object

Supervisor: Dr Naomi Vogt (History of Art) and Dr Michael Dieter (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies)

Research Description: My study tries to interrogate and provide an evaluative framework for theorizing artistic experimentations with blockchain technology and NFTs as critical phenomena to responding to contemporary art’s financialisation. I aim to develop an analytical framework exploring how artistic experimentations with blockchain as a medium can be used in articulating critical concepts for art’s autonomisation. If blockchain art cannot be divorced from cryptocurrencies, markets and financial modes of artistic individuation, perhaps their potential lies in the degree to which they use their embeddedness as positive projects. As such, I’m interested in historical categories of avant-gardism and modernism, conceptual and post-conceptual art, narratives of financialisation and the constitutive role of technology in artistic discourse and practice

h, Goodwin, Tom

Tom Goodwin

Email: Tom.Goodwin@warwick.ac.uk

Thesis title: Millenarian Modernism: British architecture at the turn of the twenty-first century

Supervisor: Otto Saumarez Smith and Kamila Kociałkowska

Research Description: Following the establishment of the National Lottery in 1994, commentators diagnosed Britain with ‘Lottery Fever’. Billions of pounds raised through the sale of Lottery tickets poured into hundreds of architectural projects across the country, resulting in a wave of new museums, sporting and performing arts venues, environmental centres, bridges, and public squares. My research examines Lottery-funded examples of these architectural typologies to historicise this period of dramatic change in British architectural culture and production. To achieve this, I am reconstructing the motivations of the constellation of actors – architects, local authorities, central government, and the Lottery funding distribution bodies – who helped propel the Lottery building boom forward and demonstrating how the Lottery forged a new relationship between political ideology and architectural possibilities during John Major’s premiership (1990-1997).

h Lin, Haoyang

Haoyang Lin

Email: Haoyang.Lin@warwick.ac.uk

Thesis title: The Collective Imaginary of Cathay in the Visual Culture of North Italy in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

Supervisor: Prof. Louise Bourdua and Dr. Marta Ajmar

Research Description: My doctoral thesis studies the image of Cathay (early modern China) as created by artists and mapmakers in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century North Italy. Eastern elements have often been considered as exotic tastes, while their artistic functions and symbolism require fuller interpretation. My research explores in an original way how Cathay was represented in North Italy in all its facets by comprehensively examining the changing depictions of Tartar textiles, Mongols, and cartography over two centuries. I examine the sources used by Italian artists and how Cathay artefacts were transformed by major artists, and by patrons to acquire new meanings. My study integrates textual and visual materials, including travel accounts, missionary reports, and merchant handbooks, to trace how artistic and cartographic representations engaged with cross-cultural knowledge of the Far East in depiction of Cathay in Venetan world maps. This involves comparisons with extant objects and contemporary Asian images. Proceeding to study patrons’ inventories, possessions, artistic commissions, and involvement in politics and trade, I study geo-political, historical, and economic contexts for each commission across time. These individual case studies form a macro-historical perspective. Ultimately, I hope to reconstruct artists’ re-creation of Cathay through a process of appropriation, elaboration, and repurposing.

This research is supported by the Chancellor's International Scholarships (Warwick), 2023-2026

h Rathbone, Daniel

Daniel Rathbone

Email: Daniel.Rathbone@warwick.ac.uk

Thesis title: The People's Parks, Contested Public Spaces and Lost Heritage in Urban South Africa

Supervisor: Dr. Jonathan Cane

Research Description: My research focuses on the People's Parks as a historical and cultural event within South African urban history. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework for my methodology, I am interested in how archives and digital methodologies can mediate the experience of public memory. In particular, working with the photographs and documents of the People's Parks archive can further discussions on spatial histories, cultural production and debates on community heritage in South Africa today

h Staccoli, Laura

Laura Staccoli

Email: Laura.Staccoli@warwick.ac.uk

Thesis title: Theory, practice and culture of disegno in the Carracci’s Reform of the Arts, 1582-1619

Supervisor: Dr Giorgio Tagliaferro, Prof. David Ekserdjian, and Dr. David Hemsoll

Research Description: Drawing was at the core of the Carracci Academy, established in Bologna in 1582 by the brothers Agostino and Annibale together with their cousin Ludovico. Wanting to break with the local artistic tradition, the Carracci promoted a radically different approach to art, based on the study of nature and life drawing, and created a new pedagogical path for the education of the artist, which eventually came to dominate European art until the nineteenth century. By analysing the materiality, function and use of drawings in the Academy, with a particular focus on Agostino Carracci (Bologna 1557- Parma 1602), this project will explore the concept and practice of disegno, intended not only as an academic exercise, but also as a fundamental element in the visualization and exchange of ideas, and its impact on the development of knowledge and visual culture

h Tollot, Francesco

Francesco Tllot

Email: Francesco.Tollot@warwick.ac.uk

Thesis title: Boundless Colours – luminosity, coloured reflections, iridescence and mist in the Venetian landscape

Supervisor: Professor Paul Smith and Dr. Giorgio Tagliaferro

Research Description: My project addresses the perceptual difference between surface colour (the colour of matt surfaces) and film colour (the colour of boundless visual phenomena such as the sky, fog, or reflections on the water’s surface) in the context of the Venetian landscape painting. In Venice, film colour manifests itself in particularly iconic–i.e. visually salient and significant– ways, thanks largely to the reflectiveness of the city’s canals and its humid and enveloping atmosphere, which scatters and diffuses light.

Historically, a number of painters devised different technical strategies in order to replicate on canvas the aesthetic peculiarity of the city’s landscape. My dissertation focuses on four of them, showcasing several different ways in which film colour appears in the city. These include: Giovanni Bellini and the jewel-like luminosity of his backgrounds and textiles, Claude Monet and the iridescence of his enveloping Venetian atmospheres, Davide Battistin and his coloured reflections on the surface of the lagoon and Walter Sickert and his treatment of gold and light in his views of Saint Mark and the Salute.

The reaserch seeks to explore the mutual relationship established between Venice and its painters, the role played by artists in creating and upholding a peculiaarly Venetian visual identity and the role played by Venice as a privileged site for artistic sperimentation and researc

h Wilde, Bryony

Bryony Wilde

Email: Bryony.Wilde@warwick.ac.uk

Thesis title: Monks & Monkeys: A Comparative Study of English Medieval Roof Bosses at St Marys Redcliffe and Tewkesbury Abbey (1100-1540)

Supervisor: Dr Jenny Alexander

Research Description: This thesis proposed an informed comparison of St Mary’s Redcliffe, Bristol and Tewkesbury Abbey, Tewkesbury surviving roof bosses. This will specifically focus on similarities and differences between the two sites by looking at design choice, the development of architectural style, the impact of patronage and iconographic choices. Through this research this project aims to add to the ongoing re-evaluation of the medieval period through a study of the conscious expression and idiosyncrasies of these sculptures