Research in the Department

The Department provides an excellent environment for the pursuit of both teaching and research. It has repeatedly been awarded top grades in national assessments of Teaching Quality and Research Excellence. It also has an unequalled track record in attracting external research funding. Over the past decade it has been ‘home’ to no fewer than five major AHRC-funded research projects including the Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies and a project on The Moral Nature of the Image in the Renaissance. Two further projects are currently running, one entitled Meeting Margins: Transnational Art in Latin America and Europe 1950-78, a three year AHRC funded study led by Valerie Fraser in collaboration with the University of the Arts, London. The other is Aesthetics after Photography, a three-year research project in collaboration with the University of Warwick, which is led by Margaret Iversen and was inaugurated in autumn 2007.

Research interests of individual members of staff include Picasso and the Surrealist milieu (Neil Cox), 20th-century Austrian and German art (Peter Vergo), Pre-Raphaelite painting (Michaela Giebelhausen), Goya (Sarah Symmons), Rodin and contemporary science (Natasha Ruiz-Gómez). Also located within the Department of Art History and Theory is the Centre for Curatorial Studies (Director: Matthew Poole), which brings together research in the field of museology, exhibition studies and curatorial practice and also delivers postgraduate programmes in each of these areas including a professionally accredited MA in Gallery Studies.  Centre for Curatorial Studies (CCS)

Teaching, particularly at the graduate level, is bound up with these activities and research interests, creating a sense of urgency and dynamism that focuses our students' minds.

Another distinctive feature of the Department is its long-standing engagement with questions of art theory and art-historical methodology. The late Michael Podro, one of the founders of the Department, wrote a definitive study on the beginnings of art history as a discipline entitled The Critical Historians of Art. Margaret Iversen wrote a monograph on one of those pioneer art historians, Alois Riegl. She is also author of a book on psychoanalytic art theory, Art Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The late Thomas Puttfarken made a major contribution to the history of Renaissance art with his Discovery of Pictorial Composition and Titian and Tragic Painting (2005). Other recent publications included Peter Vergo’s That Divine Order: Music and the Visual Arts from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century, Michaela Giebelhausen’s Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in mid-Victorian Britain and Valerie Fraser’s Building the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930-1960.

Areas of research

• European Art 1250-1700 particularly in Italy, France and the Netherlands
• British and European Art and Theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• Twentieth-century Art and Theory in Europe, Britain and North America
• Expressionism
• Cubism
• Surrealism
• Aesthetics and theory of art
• Contemporary art and theory
• Psychoanalysis and art
• Photography since the ’60s
• Art, Film and Lens-Based Media
• Art and Music
• Colonial and modern Latin American art since Independence
• History and Theory of Architecture
• Museology and Gallery Studies