Research in Art History, Curating and Visual Studies

Our research in the Department covers a broad range of themes and topics, from medieval and Renaissance art and architecture to contemporary global art. Our work is multifaceted, and engages with historical issues as well as theoretical questions.

• Art, gender and sexuality
• Imperialism, nationalism, and the decolonization of art institutions
• Museums, curating and the politics of exhibitions
• Antiquity and the classical tradition in the visual arts
• Contemporary art and cultural studies

Projects

Recent and current research projects include: 

• Cook's new clothes
• Continuity/Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918-1939 (CRAACE)
• Promoting Imperial and National Identities: Museums in Austria-Hungary
• Restitution and Institutional Change
• Sculptural experiments in Britain, 1837-1901
• We have never been pre-modern: Montezuma’s Crown, empire collection and repatriation
• Re-reading and re-writing at the French court in the early sixteenth century: Anne de Graville
• Birmingham to Ballarat: Visualizing antiquity in global Victorian cultures
• Édouard Vuillard: Art and the Politics of Domesticity at the End of the Nineteenth Century 
• The Emulation of Antiquity: Designing Renaissance Buildings from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo
• Art and the Home

The Department also publishes Midlands Art Papers (published in September 2017) and the Journal of Art Historiography.