Tue 19 Nov, 2019 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

Emergent evacuations?: African women’s corporate bodies a...

Please join us for our fourth Frank Davis Memorial Lecture of 2019. The contradictory logics of colonialism can be understood to have been anxiety-producing in relation to bodily sovereignty, most especially for African women. However, the colonial order also enabled a challenge from within, if one was sufficiently light-footed and…

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Tue 29 Oct, 2019 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

A Coptic Center in Medieval West Africa: Reframing Preste...

Please join us for our second Frank Davis Memorial Lecture of 2019. This paper explores the importance of new technologies in the art historical study of Medieval West Africa and how related methodologies both help us understand the important art and architectural landscape here in this period, and how Africa…

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Find Out MoreA Coptic Center in Medieval West Africa: Reframing Prester John and Early Global Trade

Tue 12 Nov, 2019 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

Material Journeys: Mamluk Metalwork in West Africa

The Arts of Pre-Colonial Africa Please join us for the third Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series of the year. Africa south of the Sahara has received little attention from scholars studying global exchange networks before what Abu-Lughod has referred to as the era of European hegemony. There is, however, compelling…

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Fri 25 Oct, 2019 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

Paper, Ink, Vodun, and the Inquisition: Tracing Power in ...

Please join us for the first Frank Davis Memorial Lecture of the year. In 1730, the Inquisition of Lisbon arrested José Francisco, an enslaved man raised in West Africa, who had learned in Brazil the art and craft of making amulets known as bolsas de mandinga. In their composition, use,…

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Find Out MorePaper, Ink, Vodun, and the Inquisition: Tracing Power in the Early Modern Portuguese-Speaking Atlantic World

Mon 29 Oct, 2018 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

On the Spot! The African Contribution to Colonial Art in ...

This lecture will explore the ‘decentering’ of Art History by the artistic and visual material made by colonial artists in the French West Indies in the early modern period. These works testify to the encounters between Europeans and Africans (mostly) and, to a lesser extent, with indigenous people. This visual archive,…

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Find Out MoreOn the Spot! The African Contribution to Colonial Art in Early Modern French Empire

Mon 8 Oct, 2018 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

Global Encounters and Art History, 1450-1750

European artistic experience in the early modern period was a global one, inceasingly filled with peoples, things, materials, and memories from worlds beyond Europe. Yet the content, chronology, and structure of art history’s European canon has barely changed for the period. Attending to the global dimensions of early modern European…

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Mon 15 Oct, 2018 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

‘Dreaming has a Share in History’: Thinking Around Black ...

This lecture will reflect on recent developments in Black British Art with a focus on the work of Lubaina Himid and other artists of her generation. Over the course of a career spanning several decades, Himid has produced an extraordinary body of work in a variety of media in which…

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Mon 3 Dec, 2018 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

Rethinking Image and Narrative at the Heart of Empire: No...

Indigenous people have been travelling to London – willingly or otherwise – since 1502. They have come as captives and diplomats, missionaries and performers, activists and artists. Drawing on this long history of Indigenous engagement with the heart of empire, this talk places the visual record of Indigenous presence in…

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Mon 27 Nov, 2017 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

Protest in Movement: Marching in the Modern City

Marches have long been a key tool of protest used by a wide range of movements on both Left and Right. This lecture will look at the symbolic and strategic functions of marches in modern and contemporary collective action, their representations and iconic status in the public imagination. It will…

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Mon 13 Nov, 2017 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

From Graffiti to Riots: Contested Space in the Renaissanc...

Demonstrations, riots, and rebellions—but also graffiti, shouts, songs, and libellous placards—were part of a repertoire that the “disenfranchised masses” used to influence elite politics in the Renaissance and early modern city. Social historians have shown that premodern European political developments can no longer exclusively be attributed to a parade of…

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Find Out MoreFrom Graffiti to Riots: Contested Space in the Renaissance City

Mon 9 Oct, 2017 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

Protest on the Piazza: Early Modern Revolts and a few lat...

One consequence of the ‘spatial turn’ in history and the social sciences is a growing interest in the location of protest. In the 21st century, its location in squares is impossible to miss. Was this true in early modern Europe as well? The revolt of Naples in 1647 is an…

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Mon 6 Nov, 2017 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

City walls, piazze, hoods, flags, and bells: The Topograp...

Despite their prejudices and ideological objectives, contemporary chronicles and surviving illustrations from the late Middle Ages fail to support models drawn by historians and social scientists (George Rudé, Charles Tilly, James C. Scott and others). By their reckoning, modern ‘repertories’ of popular revolt have been large-scale, city-wide, organized in advance,…

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Mon 4 Dec, 2017 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

What Punk does to Art History / What Art History does to ...

In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock became widespread all over Europe, with sounds, but also images, clothes and attitudes. Based on a constant refusal to inscribe itself inside the artistic world, punk nevertheless soon became something to collect. Even if punk objects and images were usually valued…

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Tue 13 Dec, 2016 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series

Seeing art in the best light

For the majority of gallery visitors, sight is the principal sense through which we can experience artworks. To facilitate good vision we need good lighting and light is therefore an essential element of the gallery environment. But the very light that activates our vision can also damage the precious exhibits we wish to see. Exhibition lighting itself therefore embodies the classic dichotomy at the heart of the museum, the competing roles of preservation and display.…

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Tue 29 Nov, 2016 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series

Searching for darkness: archaeological perspectives on ca...

Throughout Irish prehistory human groups sought out caves for a variety of activities including burial, excarnation and as theatres in which to conduct religious rituals. Fundamental to all such rites was the interaction with darkness, whether focussed on the transition between the light outside and the darkness inside, or purposefully…

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Tue 22 Nov, 2016 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series

Attuned illuminations: On the cultural practices of illum...

Light does more than simply illuminate spaces. It fills them with a tone; a ‘something’ that may seize us emotionally as an atmosphere. The use of light to create such atmospheres is however not simply a matter of universal aesthetics. Light is entangled in notions of class, style, security, intimacy,…

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Tue 18 Oct, 2016 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series

Solid Light, Dark Rooms

Born St Paul’s Cray, England, in 1946. Lives and works in Manhattan. McCall is known for his ‘solid-light’ installations, a series that he began in 1973 with “Line Describing a Cone,” in which a volumetric form composed of projected light slowly evolves in dark, three-dimensional space. Occupying a space between…

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Tue 11 Oct, 2016 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series

Light and colour; dark and shadow

Light and colour and the other side of the same coin, darkness and shadow, are all fundamental aspects of works of art in a practical way (can we see the work?), a formal fashion (what colours are used?) and conceptually (why these colours? Why this light or this lighting?). But…

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Tue 8 Dec, 2015 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

Performance and De-synchronization: Opening the Past in C...

Nandy’s observation about the productivity of the past provides a frame to position several contemporary photographic practitioners who have performed representations through diverse idioms which have recently been termed “postdating”. Approaching work by Pushpamala N, Waswo X. Waswo, Olivier Culmann, Gauri Gill, Suresh Punjabi, Naresh Bhatia and Cop Shiva this…

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Find Out MorePerformance and De-synchronization: Opening the Past in Contemporary Indian Photography

Tue 1 Dec, 2015 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

Fragonard and Time

This lecture is about the problem of time, and a certain artist’s measured response to it. Arguably, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) was a painter who was at odds with bourgeois late eighteenth-century notions of progressive time and historical and material progress. Satish Padiyar will be asking then, how does this artist…

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Tue 10 Nov, 2015 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

Ethnography is to Anthropology as Art History is to Arts ...

There is much contemporary interest in the relation between contemporary art and ethnography, driven on both sides by a critique of the artistic and literary conventions, respectively, of the gallery and the book. Yet concerns have also been raised about whether the practices of art and ethnography can be successfully…

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Find Out MoreEthnography is to Anthropology as Art History is to Arts Practice: A Provocation

Tue 3 Nov, 2015 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

African Red

Richard Fardon will illustrate some propositions. Many African languages have a parsimonious basic colour terminology, including Chamba, a Nigerian language and culture he has worked on intensively, from which he borrows some of his examples. Chamba colour terms can be translated approximately as black/white and red/green contrastive pairs. Given only…

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Tue 20 Oct, 2015 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

From the Grotesque to Outsider Art: Where Does Art Histor...

Grotesque figuration is a constantly recurring phenomenon in Western art. Because of their roots in ancient Greek Herms and Dionysian ritual, grotesques are intimately linked to both the origins of art and the frenzy that threatens to overturn civilization. In the early modern period they literally question and undermine artistic…

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Tue 13 Oct, 2015 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, Research Forum

A Critique of the Natural Artefact: Anthropology, Art and...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, studies of ‘primitive’ and ‘tribal’ arts were closely identified with museums and collecting; when the field re-emerged in the early 1970s it was inspired by ethnography and new theorisations of symbolic systems but relatively unconnected with the vast collections of Oceania, African…

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