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:
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
Last updated: 02 August 2012.