History of Art PhD/MPhil – (Ph.D.)

Contents

Postgraduate study

The Department is located in the Barber Institute, which houses the Barber Institute gallery. This is an excellent and representative collection of post-medieval European art. It includes paintings, engravings and drawings by such artists as Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Veronese, Picasso, Magritte, as well as an important collection of nineteenth-century painting by artists such as Monet, Manet, Degas, Gauguin, Turner and Whistler. This is a valuable and convenient teaching collection which all members of staff use on a regular basis.
There is a thriving history of art postgraduate community at Birmingham, which offers a stimulating intellectual environment. A wide range of public lectures and seminar programmes are regularly hosted by the department, some of which postgraduates help to plan and organise. These provide opportunities to discuss art-historical questions with visiting speakers as well as to engage with the latest research of those working with in the University. Postgraduate students co-curate an exhibition at the Barber Institute annually and co-author and co-edit an accompanying catalogue.

| Research interests of staff

* 19th-and early 20th-century French art, design and visual culture.
* 18th-and early 19th-century French visual culture: Particular specialism in the revolutionary periods, especially iconoclasm and print culture.
* Roman architecture; Italian art, 1400–1600; Renaissance and post-Renaissance architecture in Italy and Britain.
* German and central European art and design from the mid-19th century to the present; the historiography of art; contemporary art theory and criticism.
* 18th-century Swiss art, late 19th- and early 20th-century German and Austrian art and visual culture.
* Modern and contemporary art and exhibition cultures in Europe (with specific emphasis on migration, hybridity and post-communism).