Investigates the role played by art in the exercise of and resistance to imperial power, as well as the legacies of art and empire in the contemporary world.

Britain

Explores the visual and material culture of the British empire, particularly in South Asia, in its changing historical forms, with a particular emphasis on the C18th and C19th.

Projects

• Victoria's Self Fashioning: curating the royal image for dynasty, nation and empire
• Sculpture Victorious: rediscovering the rich diversity and cultural significance of this art form
• Art, Air and Illness exhibition: how we perceive and experience the impact of the environment on human health
• Britain, Empire and Commonwealth at the Venice Biennale
• Shaped on Stone: how the invention of a radical mass media technology shaped the world we live in today

Publications

• Rosie Dias. "Recording and Representing India: The East India Company's Landscape Practices" and "A Map of Kolkata in 1785", Picturing Places (British Library, 2017)
• Rosie Dias. 'A Sentimental Empire of Things: Queen Victoria's Indian Gifts' in British Women and the Cultural Practices of Empire 1770-1940, ed. Rosie Dias and Kate Smith (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
• Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention 1837-1901, ed. Martina Droth, Michael Hatt and Jason Edwards (Yale University Press, 2014)

Denmark

Examines the visual and material culture of the Danish empire in its changing historical forms, with a particular emphasis on the early modern and modern periods.

Projects

• Art Through Denmark: seeing art from Denmark as a nation with a long and varied imperial history
• The Colonial Object: addressing the movement of objects in Danish, European, and Arctic contexts
• Reassessing Transcultural Techne: how games and art cemented an international community of traders in C18th Canton

Publications

• Art through Denmark. Special issue of Art History 43, no. 2 (April 2020), ed. Michael Hatt and Margit Thøfner, with essays by Michale Hatt and Josefine Baark
• Joesfine Baark. 'The Tranquebar Palampore: Trade, Diplomacy and "a little amusement" in Early Modern Indo-Danish Relations'. Eighteenth Century Studies 52, no. 1 (2018): 69-92.
• Other publications by Josefine Baark

Venice

Investigates the representation of sovereignty as a form of absolutism in republican Venice and its empire.

Publications

• Giorgio Tagliaferro. The Doge's Palace (forthcoming)
• Giorgio Tagliaferro. ‘Celebrating the Most Serene Republic’. In Tintoretto, Artist of Renaissance Venice, ed. Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018): 208-217

• Other publications by Giorgio Tagliaferro

Latin America

Investigates how colonial visual iconography and literary references shaped the cultural production and political rhetoric of Modern Brazil.

Publications

• Danielle Stewart: Framing the City: Photography and the Construction of São Paulo (forthcoming)