2021/22
22 September 2021 | Prof. Claudia Brittenham (University of Chicago) | Making and Duration in the Unseen Art of Mesoamerica | 15:00-16:15 UK Time | View event >
29 September 2021 | Dr Amelia Hope, Teaching Fellow, Early Art (History of Art, University of Edinburgh) | Poor men and brother hermits: The Franciscans, the eremitic life, and a late thirteenth-century image of the desert | View event >
6 October 2021 | Artist Lee Mingwei | Six Stories | View event >
13 October 2021 | Prof. Nizan Shaked (California State University, Long Beach) | Museums and Wealth: the Politics of Contemporary Art Collections | View event >
20 October 2021 | Prof. Yolaine Escande (École des hautes études en sciences sociales | EHESS) | The Garden Under the Influence of Painting: The Case of the Orchid Pavilion Garden | View event >
27 October 2021 | Hannah Halliwell, Teaching Fellow (History of Art, University of Edinburgh) | Dangers, Desires and Disease: The Morphine Addict in Late Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture | View event >
10 November 2021 | Dr Marina Vishmidt (Goldsmith, London) | Structuring Feeling: On Some Modes of Writing About Contemporary Art | View event >
17 November 2021 | Prof Kenneth McConkey (Emeritus Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Trust) | The Artist Traveller at the turn of the Twentieth Century | View event >
24 November 2021 | Dr Lauren Working (University of Oxford) | Forbidden Mixtures: Still Life Painting & the Colonial Gaze | View event >
1 December 2021 | Dr Martin O'Brien (Queens Mary London)
Previous seminar series
2020/21
1 Oct 2020 | Dr Dave O’ Brien and Dr Orian Brooks (University of Edinburgh) | Culture Is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries
8 Oct 2020 | Dr Colin Brady (University of Edinburgh) | How Japanese art dealers transformed the Asian art market in America
15 Oct 2020 | Prof Kathryn Smith (New York University) | Scripture Transformed in Late Medieval England: The Religious, Artistic, and Social Worlds of the Welles-Ros Bible (Paris, BnF MS fr. 1)
22 Oct 2020 | Dr Will Rea (University of Leeds) | What art history might tell us about Pandemics: Yoruba logic and response to pandemics - the Lukuluku and measles cases in Ekiti Nigeria
5 Nov 2020 | Dr Anna Watz (Linköping University, Sweden) | Surrealism and écriture féminine
12 Nov 2020 | Dr Stephen Whiteman (The Courtauld Institute of Art) | The Emperor’s Eyes: Painting and the Production of Cosmopolitan Space in the Early Qing Court
19 Nov 2020 | Dr Megan McNamee (University of Edinburgh) | A Fourteenth-Century Almanac and the Affordances of Folding in the Later Middle Ages
3 Dec 2020 | Dr Rachel Boyd | Familiar visions: Glazed terracotta, serial production, and devotional experience in Renaissance Tuscany
13 Jan 2021 | Prof Dan Hicks (Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at Oxford and Curator at the Pitt Rivers) | The Brutish Museums
20 Jan 2021 | Dr Jamie Forde and Dr Jiemin Fang (University of Edinburgh) | Jade Across Oceans: The Power of Green Stone in Ancient China and Mesoamerica
27 Jan 2021 | Dr Ilse Sturkenboom (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich) | Writing on Colour and Gold: The Use and Meaning of Chinese Decorated Paper in Fifteenth-Century Persianate Manuscripts
3 Feb 2021 | Dr Mira Xenia Schwerda (University of Edinburgh) | A Postcard from the Revolution: Photography and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution
10 Feb 2021 | Dr Madeline Haddon (University of Edinburgh) | Loal Color: Race, Gender, and Spanishness in European Painting, 1855-1927
17 Feb 2021 | Gražina Subelytė (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice) | Okamoto Tarō and Kurt Seligmann: The Magical Myth of Tomorrow
24 Feb 2021 | Prof. Giovanna Zapperi (Université de Tours) | The end of the creative genius? Women artists in Italy, 1960s-1970s
3 Mar 2021 | Dr Aline Gillermet (University of Cambridge) | Thinking About the Medium: Digital Painting in the 2010s
10 Mar 2021 | Prof Amy Bryzgel (University of Aberdeen) | Teaching the Ephemeral: Performance Pedagogy Performance art in East-Central Europe
17 Mar 2021 | Dr Bryony Coombs (University of Edinburgh) | Immytateur de madame Nature,’ Jean Perréal and the humanists in early-sixteenth century France
CANCELLED 25 Mar 2021 | Dr Marina Vishmidt (Goldsmiths, University of London) | Structuring Feeling: On Some Modes of Writing About Contemporary Art | 5.15pm
2019/20
19 Sep 2019 | Prof. Celeste-Marie Barnier (University of Edinburgh) | Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art (1965-2015) | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
26 Sep 2019 | Prof. Ava Hsueh | Interbreeding: The Vitality of Taiwan Art Groups after 1990s | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
3 Oct 2019 | Dr Edward Payne (Durham University) | Seicento Naples: 'Fierce Reality'? | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
10 Oct 2019 | Dr Alexandra Makin | The Cuthbert Maniple Recreation Project: what can an experimental embroidery project tell us about this early medieval art form? | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
17 Oct 2019 | Dr Sally Foster (University of Stirling) | My Life as a Replica: understanding the values and meanings of the St John's Cross, Iona from creation to present | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
24 Oct 2019 | Dr Cadence Kinsey (University College, London) | Fluid Dynamics | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
7 Nov 2019 | Prof. Vidya Dehejia (Columbia University) | To the Divine Through The Path of Beauty: An Exploration | West Court | 6pm
14 Nov 2019 | Bill Hare (University of Edinburgh) | Scottish Artists in an Age of Radical Change, 1945 to the 21st Century | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
POSTPONED (New date to be confirmed) | Dr Stefan Hanß (University of Manchester) | Material Cross-Referencing: Creativity and Craft Cultures at Early Modern Courts
21 Nov 2019 | The Watson Gordon Lecture: Dr Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw (Director of History, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC) | White House/White Cube: Portraits, Paintings, and the American Presidency | Scottish National Gallery, Hawthornden Lecture Theatre | 6pm
CANCELLED | 28 Nov 2019 | Dr Will Rea (University of Leeds) | 'The iroko woodcarvers of Ekiti: An art history in Africa' | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
16 Jan 2020 | Prof. Abigail Harrison Moore (University of Leeds) | Women and Energy, Crafts and electrick decision making | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
23 Jan 2020 | Dr Karen Dempsey (University of Dublin) | Tending the ‘Contested’ Castle Garden: sowing seeds of feminist thought | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
30 Jan 2020 | Dr Alexandra Loske (University of Sussex) | Squaring the colour circle: Pioneering women in colour literature and theory | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
6 Feb 2020 | Professor Jonathan Eburne (Pennsylvannia State University) | The Great Surrealist Bargain Basement | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
13 Feb 2020 | Dr Tom Stammers (University of Durham) | Heritage and collecting in the Jewish Country House | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
04 Mar 2020 | Dr Umberto Bongianino (University of Oxford) and Dr Ben Tilghman (Washington College) | Art of the Global Middle Ages: Exchange and Ecology | 2.30pm
12 Mar 2020 | Gražina Subelytė | Kurt Seligmann and Taro Okamoto: Parallel Approaches to Myth and Magic
19 Mar 2020 | Prof. Kathryn Smith (New York University) | Transformed in Late Medieval England: The Religious, Artistic, and Social Worlds of the Welles-Ros Bible | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
26 Mar 2020 | Dr Laura Guy (Newcastle University) | Informed Consent: The public lives of queer objects | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
2 Apr 2020 | Dr Stephen Whiteman (Courtauld Institute) | The Emperor’s Eyes: Painting and the Production of Cosmopolitan Space in the Early Qing Court | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre | 5.15pm
2018/19
27 Sep 2018 | Richard Williams | Art history futures - what next for the discipline? | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
4 Oct 2018 | Dr Halle O’Neal | Word Embodied: Entangled Icons in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Art | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
11 Oct 2018 | Patrick Elliott | Leonora Carrington’s Portrait of Max Ernst, c.1939: A New Acquisition for the National Galleries of Scotland | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
18 Oct 2018 | Dr Felicity Gee | Object-fantasticality [gegenstandsfantastik] - or What is Magic Realism? | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
25 Oct 2018 | Dr Christian Weikop | Screening: Strategy: Get Arts (1970). In Conversation with the Artist Alexander Hamilton | ECA Main Buliding, West Court
8 Nov 2018 | Professor Cynthia Hahn | Heart’s Desire: From Christ, to Crown, to Eros | The Watson Gordon Lecture | National Gallery of Scotland, Hawthornden Lecture Theatre, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
15 Nov 2018 | Dr Tamara Trodd | WELCOME! Elizabeth Price and the Life of Objects | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
22 Nov 2018 | Dr Matthew Potter | When England grew out of her saucy youth’: the Fin-de-Siècle German Reception of Gillray and Rowlandson, 1895 – 1908 | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
29 Nov 2018 | Professor Elizabeth Prettejohn | The Case of M. Alphonse Legros | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
17 Jan 2019 | Kate Cowcher | This is Lenin! Demystifying Revolution in Socialist Ethiopia | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
31 Jan 2019 | Dominic Johnson | Action Sculpture: The Body/Object Problem in the Performances of Skip Arnold | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
7 Feb 2019 | Michelle Foot | The Celtic Revival and Modern Spiritualism: fairies, witches and haunted landscapes | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
14 Feb 2019 | Andrea Phillips | Contemporary Art and the Production of Inequality | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
28 Feb 2019 | David Munro | Oceanography – bridging the gap between art and science | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
7 March 2019 | Cinta Krahe | Chinese porcelain in Habsburg Spain | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
14 March 2019 | Simon Shaw-Miller | The Orphic Tendency in Early Abstraction | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
21 March 2019 | Kamini Vellodi | On writing a dictionary: some philosophical problems | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
28 March 2019 | Stewart Martin | A brief history of the art strike | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
4 April 2019 | Mieke Bal | Thinking in Film: How Thought Moves | Hunter Building, Lecture Theatre
2017/2018
21 Sep | Sir Mark Jones | Algernon Newton 1880-1968
28 Sep | Dr Sabrina Rastelli (Università Ca'Foscari Venezia) | A New History of Chinese Art History
5 Oct | Professor Andrew Ginger (University of Birmingham) | Visions of Similarity: Spanish-speaking Artists, the World, and the “Nineteenth Century”
12 Oct | Professor Timon Screech (SOAS) | The Essence of the Floating World in Early Modern Japanese Art
16 Oct (Lunchtime lecture, 12.30pm) | Professor Sherry D. Fowler (University of Kansas) | Counting on Buddhist Images of Six Kannon for Salvation in Japan
19 Oct | Sebastian Boyle | Real Artificial Cream: Sebastian Boyle discusses the work of Boyle Family
26 Oct | Professor Neil Cox (University of Edinburgh) | The Shape of Feeling
9 Nov | Watson Gordon Lecture at the Scottish National Gallery | Professor Joseph Masheck (Hofstra University, New York) | Classic Mondrian in Neo-Calvinist View | 6pm
16 Nov | Dr Jemma Field (Brunel University London) | Undressing Queen Anne of Denmark: Fictions, Realities, and the Power of Portraiture
23 Nov | Professor Richard Williams (University of Edinburgh) | The City on the Highway, Revisited: Reading Reyner Banham's Los Angeles in the Age of Waymo
30 Nov | Dr Egle Rindzeviciute (Kingston University) | Constructing Russian Nuclear Heritage: The Organisation, Politics and Aesthetics of Revealing
18 Jan | Dr Tom Tolley (University of Edinburgh) | Wolfgang and ‘The Little Chimney Sweep’: Leopold Mozart’s Pictures of Working Children
25 Jan | Dr Paula Barreiro López (University of Barcelona) | Comrades in Arms against Dictatorship: the Avant-garde, Art Criticism and the Franco Regime
1 Feb | Dr Christine Riding (Royal Museums Greenwich) | The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I: Making, Meaning and Afterlife
8 Feb | Dr Lucy Weir (University of Edinburgh) | Pina Bausch’s Theatre of Cruelty
15 Feb | Professor Eric Robertson (Royal Holloway) | Curating Arp’s Poetic Forms
1 Mar | Professor Elizabeth Prettejohn (University of York) | The Case of M. Alphonse Legros
Postponed | Dr Cinta Krahe (Universidad de Alcalá and Universidad Antonio de Nebrija) | Chinese porcelain in Habsburg Spain
22 Mar | Professor Charles Esche (Van Abbemuseum / University of the Arts London) | The Demodern as a Possibility for Western Europe
29 Mar | Dr Jill Burke (University of Edinburgh) | Leonardo da Vinci's 'Female Genitalia': Women's bodies and the limits of representation
5 Apr | Dr Gabriele Schor (Sammlung Verbund, Vienna) | The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s
10 May (Rescheduled date) | Professor Kerstin Stakemeier (Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Nuremberg) | Against our Freedom: about an anti-social aesthetic practice
2016/2017
Dr Ruth Hemus (Royal Holloway, University of London) | Dada’s Women: Reflections in the Centenary Year
Dr Genevieve Warwick (University of Edinburgh) | Effigies
Dr Michael Bachmann (University of Glasgow) | Distributed Aesthetics, Contemporary Criticism and the Public Sphere
Michael Clarke (National Gallery of Scotland) | The Reluctant Matriarch: Madame Mére, the Painter Gérard and Dynastic Portraiture under Napoleon
Professor Catherine Asher (University of Minnesota) | The Taj Mahal: Mughal Architecture, Ideology and the Construction of Kingship
Professor Phillip Lindley (University of Leicester) | The Union Duke’s Marbles
Professor Hilary Robinson (Middlesex University) | Griselda Pollock and the making of UK feminist art history and criticism in the 1970s
Dr Helen Langdon (writer, scholar, and curator) | Watson Gordon Lecture: Caravaggio, the Caravaggisti and Cupid
Dr Richard McClary (University of Edinburgh) | Mina'i: Gilded Polychrome Ceramics of Kashan and the Birth of Persian Painting
Dr Amy Bryzgel (University of Aberdeen) | Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960
Dr Chia-ling Yang (University of Edinburgh) | Antiquity Revisited: New Modes for Scholarly Art in 19th-Century China
Dr Luca Palozzi (University of Edinburgh) | Drawing before the Disegno: Reflections on Trecento Art Theory and Practice
Carla van de Puttelaar (Utrecht University) | The Scougall Family, Portrait Painters in a Legal Community, Scottish Portraiture 1650-1714
Dr Carol Richardson (University of Edinburgh) | Art and Gynaecology at St Peter's in Rome
Professor David Hopkins (University of Glasgow) | Oz magazine and Surrealism's legacy: children, obscenity and the politics of counter culture
Professor Geoffrey Quilley (University of Sussex) | British art, empire and the Opium War; the view from Dent's veranda
Dr Anna McSweeney (Warburg Institute, SOAS, University of London) | Object Biographies: a carved and painted ceiling from the Alhambra Palace
Professor Herbert Kessler (Johns Hopkins University) | 'Whoever Wishes to Know God, Look at the Glass'; Medieval Windows as Scripture
Dr Matt Lodder (University of Essex) | Cynicism and Contemporary Art: The Curious Case of Dan Wolgers
2015/2016
Professor Richard Thomson (University of Edinburgh) | Seurat's Parade de cirque: Interpreting a Painting, Organising an Exhibition
Dr Lucia Dolce (SOAS, University of London) | The Visual Practices of Buddhism: Ritual Iconography and the Resignification of Visual Forms in Mediaeval Japan
Professor Paul Gladston (University of Nottingham) | (Bad) Faith in Painting (?): Critically Re-evaluating the Significance of Yu Youhan’s Political Pop Series
Dr Lisa Skogh (Victoria and Albert Museum) | The Kunstkammer and the Early Modern Consort: Knowledge, Networks and Influence
Dr Jenny Terry (Durham University) | Afrofuturism, Sci-fi and the Scopic in the Art of Ellen Gallacher
Dr Freya Gowrley (University of Edinburgh) | The Sister Arts: Needlework between Thread, Paint, and Print in Eighteenth-century Britain
Dr Sussan Babaie (Courtauld Institute of Art) | A Medieval Picture Book and its Judeo-Persian Lives: The Morgan Bible in 17th century Safavid Iran
Professor Lex Bosman (University of Amsterdam) | The Cathedral of Rome in the Fourth Century. New Ideas about the Architectural Ground-plan of the Basilica Constantiniana (S. Giovanni in Laterano)
Dr Eric Lefebvre (Musée Cernuschi) | Exhibiting and Collecting Chinese Contemporary Painting in the Modern Era: The Case of the French Museums (1920-1960)
Dr Martin Myrone (Tate) | 1832: The Progress of Civilization in the Age of Reform
Dr Terri Geis (Pomona College, USA) | Archipelagos: International Women Surrealists and the Ocean
Ed Krčma (University of East Anglia) | Compression
Ayesha Hameed (Goldsmiths) | Black Atlantis
Emanuele Lugli (University of York) | The New Look of the 1340s: Fashion, Measurements and Other Disasters
Kate Sloan (University of Edinburgh) | The Analogue Game: Aircraft Control and Play in Roy Ascott's Pedagogy
Andrew Patrizio (University of Edinburgh) | The Year that Art History got a Hole in its Ozone Layer
Rachel King (National Museums Scotland) | "Asbestos Fingers and Flaming Lips”: Tea, Coffee and Silver Vessels in the 18th Century
Margit Kern (University of Hamburg) | Hieroglyphs of Faith: Missionaries as Actors in Transcultural Negotiation Processes and Image Theory in 16th Century New Spain
Xavier Guillaume (University of Edinburgh) | Paint it Black: Colours and the Social Meaning of the Battlefield
2014/2015
Professor Michael Yonan (University of Missouri) | Interlaced: Meaning and Materiality in an Eighteenth-Century Imperial Gown
Dr Charlie Miller (University of Manchester) | Cubism After Cubism
Dr Gavin Grindon (University of Essex) | Disobedient Objects: Art History, Curating and Social Movement Cultures
Dr Glyn Davis (University of Edinburgh) | Beckett, Warhol
Professor Geraldine Johnson (University of Oxford) | ‘Photo-Sculpsit’: Sculpture, Photography and the History of Art
Dr Tom Nichols (University of Glasgow) | Surviving the ‘Father of Art’: Titian and his followers
Professor Joanna Cannon (Courtauld Institute of Art) | Religious Poverty, Visual Riches: Art in the Dominican Churches of Central Italy in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
Dr David Bomford (The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) | Watson Gordon Lecture, Unfinished Paintings: Narratives of the Non-Finito
Professor Viccy Coltman (University of Edinburgh) | Scots in Europe: Later Eighteenth-Century Portraiture and the Grand Tour
Dr Stacy Boldrick (University of Leicester) | Breaking and Remaking Images: Iconoclasm’s Cruel Practices
Film screening | In the Shadow of Forward Motion
Samuel Bibby (Art History) | The Magazine as Catalogue, or, The Assemblage of Specimens
Dr Lara Eggleton (University of York) | Research as folly, or, How to productively “ruin” your research
Professor Alex Danchev (University of St Andrews) | The Life and the Life-Writing
Professor Jonathan Mills (University of Edinburgh) | A Potted History of Festivals and Festival Making, Part of the Jonathan Mills Lectures series
Dr Patricia Allmer (University of Edinburgh) | Shadows of Herself: Lee Miller’s Collage
Film screening | Experimental Histories: Queer Lives on Film
Kirstie Meehan (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) | Please Touch: Artists in the Archive
Professor Whitney Davis (University of California, Berkeley) | Composite Formation: Freud’s Rome and the Phantasy of “Self-Analysis.”
Professor Caroline Arscott (Courtauld Institute of Art) | Dyeing Bleaching, Printing: Morris and Abundance
Dr Heather Pulliam (University of Edinburgh) | Visions and Revisions: John Duncan’s Celtic Revival
Dr Colin Cruise (Aberystwyth University) | Rossetti on Paper
Dr Robert Mills (University College London) | Derek Jarman Gets Medieval
