Research in Art History

Art History at Essex provides an excellent environment for the pursuit of both teaching and research achieving top grades in national assessments of Teaching Quality and Research excellence together with 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 projects on The Moral Nature of the Image in the Renaissance (a three-year long examination of the modes of reception of religious and secular art in the Renaissance); UECLAA on-line, a three-year project to create a digital catalogue of the exceptional collection of Latin-American art held at the University; Meeting Margins: Transnational Art in Latin America and Europe 1950-78, a three-year AHRC funded study in collaboration with the University of the Arts, London and Aesthetics after Photography, a three-year research project in collaboration with the University of Warwick.

Current research interests of individual members of staff include: Modern Art in France, especially Cubism and interwar Surrealism (Neil Cox); The cultural significance of the museum, museum architecture, and Photography and the Paris Commune (Michaela Giebelhausen); the art, architecture and urbanism of the Italian Renaissance (Caspar Pearson); Rodin and contemporary science (Natasha Ruiz-Gómez).

Also located within Art History 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. Our research culture is frequently enriched by research visitors; during 2010-11, for example, we welcomed the University’s first ever Fulbright Scholar, Jann Marson, working on Belgian Surrealism, as well as Post-Doctoral researcher Julia Pine, working on late Dali.

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 Art History at Essex 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 of Art History and Theory, 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
• Dada and Surrealism
• Historiography of art history
• Contemporary Art and Theory
• Psychoanalysis and Art
• Photography since the ’60s
• Colonial and modern Latin American art since Independence
• History and Theory of Architecture
• Urbanism and the built environment
• Museology and Gallery Studies
• Contemporary Curatorial Practice and Theory