ULEMHAS   BIRKBECK & ALUMNI HISTORY OF ART SOCIETY
 

 

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  NOTE: These biographies of past and present speakers were believed accurate when posted, but may not be complete if the subject is not a contributor to the current programme.
   
  Tom Abbot is a long term resident of Berlin, where he has ample opportunity to pursue his passion for architecture from the Baroque to the present day. Born in the United States, he graduated in Psychology and Art History from Minnesota and continued his studies at the Louvre School of Art History in Paris. He has devised and led many cultural tours to Germany.
   
  Marta Ajmar-Wollheim studied art history in Pavia and Milan; her doctoral research at the Warburg Institute concentrates on women, exemplarity and the domestic arts in Renaissance Italy. She was appointed by the Victoria & Albert Museum to plan and set up the Renaissance specialism within the V&A/RCA MA course in the History of Design, and recently curated the Renaissance House exhibition there.
   
  Jeremy Ashbee is Inspector of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings at English Heritage and former Curator at the Tower of London
   
  Dr John Bold BA, PhD, FSA is a senior lecturer in the history of architecture at the University of Westminster, specialising in the 17th and 18th architecture of London. He is a consultant to the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and to the National Maritime Museum, and has been consultant to the Cultural Heritage Division of the Council of Europe.
   
  Dr Federico Botana is a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute. His research interests include medieval Italian painting, sculpture and illuminated manuscripts. He has recently completed a monograph on the representation of the Works of Mercy in medieval Italy (forthcoming), and is currently researching didactic illustrations in fifteenth-century Tuscan vernacular manuscripts.
   
  Dr Alixe Bovey lectures in Medieval History at the University of Kent, where she specialises in the visual culture of the later Middle Ages. Her main research focus is Gothic illuminated manuscripts, and she recently presented the BBC4 series 'In Search of Medieval Britain', part of the channel's Mediaeval Season.
   
  Caroline Brooke is an associate lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London and teaches regularly on the Courtauld Institute Adult Study programme.. Her research focuses on drawing practices in Renaissance Italy, and she is co-author of the Universal Leonardo Project website - a fully comprehensive guide to the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci.
   
  Sarah Brown became Director of the York Glaziers Trust after many years with the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments and English Heritage. She combines this post with her role as lecturer in History of Art and Course Director of the MA in Stained Glass Conservation and Heritage Management in the University of York. She is chairman of the British Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi and has published widely on historic stained glass.
   
  J.B. [Barrie] Bullen is Professor Emeritus at Reading University where he treats the interface between literature and the visual arts. His books include The myth of the Renaissance in nineteenth-century writing (1995), The Pre-Raphaelite body: fear and desire in painting, poetry and criticism (1998), Byzantium rediscovered (2003), a history of the Byzantine revival, and European crosscurrents: British criticism and continental art 1810-1910 (2005).
   
  Caroline Campbell is Curator of Paintings at the Courtauld Institute. She was formerly Assistant Curator of Renaissance Paintings at the National Gallery, and was Co-Curator of the Bellini and the East exhibition there in 2006, and at Boston in 2005.
   
  Peter Cormack is a free-lance art historian, writer and lecturer. He was Keeper of the William Morris Gallery, London, where he curated many exhibitions of Morris and his circle and on aspects of the Arts and Crafts Movement, in particular stained glass. He is the Honorary Curator of Kelmscott Manor, William Morris's Oxfordshire home.
   
  Neil Cox is Professor in the Art History and Theory Department at Essex University. He specialises in 20th century French art and has written widely on the subject. His books include Cubism (2000), and as co-author A Picasso Bestiary (1995) and Marcel Duchamp (1999)
   
 
Ken Dark is Director of the Research Centre for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, University of Reading, where he is Chair of the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies and holds honorary professorships at several European and North American universities. He is co-director of the Istanbul Rescue Archaeological Survey which aims to record and rescue Byzantine material at risk of destruction in the western part of the ancient city walls.
   
  Lucy Donkin carried out her doctoral work at the Courtauld Institute, focusing on the medieval ecclesiastical pavement mosaics of northern Italy. She currently holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College, Oxford, where her research project explores attitudes to holy ground in the Middle Ages.
   
  Michael Douglas‑Scott studied at the Courtauld Institute and obtained his doctorate from Birkbeck College. He has lectured widely on 16th-century art and architecture and has written articles for the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Arte Veneta and Burlington Magazine.
   
  Peter Draper is well-known to students of History of Art at Birkbeck, where he is now a Visiting Professor. He was President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, 2000-2004, and is currently a member of the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England. His book The Formation of English Gothic: Architecture and Identity is to be published by Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in the Autumn of 2006. His publications on medieval architecture have concentrated on English cathedrals, with a particular interest in the inter-relationship between architecture and liturgy, and he is now extending these interests to include Islamic architecture.
   
  Ffiona Gilmore Eaves read archaeology at Newnham College, Cambridge. She wrote her thesis on the early church at Poreč and is co-author of Retrieving the record: a century of archaeology at Poreč, 1847-1947 (2003). She has worked in life-long learning and adult education, especially for the WEA, and has devised and led many archaeology tours in the Mediterranean area.
   
  Anna Eavis is head of English Heritage's National Monuments Record, and is a noted authority on medieval stained glass. She is Director for Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (GB) and editor of Vidimus, an on-line magazine devoted to medieval stained glass. She is currently writing the CVMA volume on the stained glass of New College.
   
  Eric Fernie was Director of the Courtauld Institute 1995-2003 and President of the Society of Antiquaries of London 2004-2007. He is a fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. His books include The Architecture of the Anglo-Saxons, An Architectural History of Norwich Cathedral, Art History and its Methods and The Architecture of Norman England.
   
  Clare Ford-Wille is an independent art historian, well known to members for her courses at Birkbeck and Morley College as well as a lecturer at the National Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum and NADFAS groups in Britain and Europe. She has led many tours abroad.
   
  Tamar Garb is Durning-Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College London. She is the author of many books on 19th Century French Art including Sisters of the Brush; Women's Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth Century Paris (YUP, 1994) Bodies of Modernity; Figure and Flesh in fin de Siècle France (T&H 1998) and most recently, The Painted Face; Portraits of Women in France, 1814-1914. She has now started working on contemporary art produced in her native South Africa and is curating an exhibition for Haunch of Venison Gallery in May 2008 entitled Home Lands/Land Marks, which focuses on landscape and language in the Post Apartheid Era.
   
  Dr Alexandra Gajewski lives in France, her main interest being mediaeval architecture. She has published on the Cistercian Abbey of Le Lys and on Cistercian architecture in Anjou and Cîteaux, inter alia. She took a PhD in Gothic architecture in Northern Burgundy at the Courtauld Institute and is currently leading tours with a number of organisations.
   
  Alexandra Gerstein is Assistant Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Courtauld Institute. She studied at the École du Louvre in Paris before completing her PhD on the architecture of the Edwardian Baroque Revival at the Courtauld. She teaches courses on Victorian sculpture and has worked on display techniques and provenance research for many exhibitions and displays
   
  Dr John Goodall is a senior properties historian at English Heritage and is writing a book on English castle architecture, to be published by Yale
   
  Christina Grande has lectured on classical art and architecture for a number of institutions, including Leicester University and the Open University, the British Museum and Birkbeck Continuing Education. She has a particular interest in the influence of classical art and architecture on later periods of art, and in this lecture will explore the influence of earlier art of that of classical antiquity
   
  Dr Oliver Green was the first Curator of the London Transport Museum in 1980; he left in 1989 but returned in 2001 to oversee its refurbishment. This year he became its first Research Fellow. He has written extensively on the art and history of London Transport, most recently, with David Bownes, London Transport posters: a century of art and design (2008).
   
  Mark Hallett is a Professor of History of Art and a member of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York, on whose website a detailed biography and bibliography can be found.
   
  Martin Henig is Hon. Professor at the Institute of Archaeology (ICL) and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He has lectured on Roman art in Oxford University for many years and has published many books and articles, among them Religion in Roman Britain (1984), The Art of Roman Britain (1995) and The Heirs of King Verica (2002)
   
  Gijs van Hensbergen read languages at Utrecht and art history at the Courtauld Institute, followed by postgraduate studies in American art of the 1960s. He has worked in England, the USA and Spain as exhibition organiser and TV researcher, and has written on Spain and Spanish art, his most recent book being Guernica (2005)
   
  Charles Hind is Associate Director (Development) and H J Heinz Curator of Drawings, British Architectural Library Drawings and Archive Collections, Victoria & Albert Museum. He has led study tours to St Petersburg for ACE.
   
  Dr Mary Hunter, a former student of Professor Tamar Garb, completed her PhD dissertation on the relationship between art and medicine in late nineteenth-century France at University College London. Her teaching and current research explores constructions of reality, sex, race and gender in visual culture from 1850 to the present. She is currently teaching a third year special subject at UCL on Art and Sexual Politics in Late Nineteenth Century France and is soon to take up a full time Assistant Professorship at McGill University in Montreal.
   
  Dr Laura Jacobus did her BA and PhD at Birkbeck where she now lectures on late mediaeval and early Renaissance Italy. She has been working on Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Chapel for nearly fifteen years, and has recently published a book on the subject, Giotto and the Arena Chapel: Art, Architecture and Experience (2008).
   
  Ann Kodicek is a writer, lecturer and curator specialising in Russian art. She lectures on the history of Russian art and other topics at the Victoria & Albert Museum and similar venues. In 1996 she curated the major exhibition – Diaghilev: Creator of the Ballets Russes (Barbican Art Gallery)
   
 
Frederica Law-Turner is a free-lance art historian, lecturer and writer. She holds an MA in Islamic Studies from Oxford and completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute in 1999. She has lectured and written extensively on medieval art, and is the author of The Ormesby Psalter recently published by the Bodleian Library.
   
  Born in Austria, Dr Gwendolyn Leick studied Assyriology and art history at Graz University. She is Senior Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Her publications include Who's Who in the Ancient Near East (1999), Sex and eroticism in Mesopotamian literature (1994), Mesopotamia, the invention of the city (2001). She was General Editor of The Babylonian world (2007).
   
  Michael Lewis is Deputy Head of the Department of Portable Antiquities and Treasure at the British Museum. His PhD (Kent) explored the 'archaeological authority' of the Bayeux Tapestry and has been published as a British Archaeological Report (404). He has also written a popular introduction to the Bayeux Tapestry – The Real World of the Bayeux Tapestry (History Press) – and numerous articles on the Tapestry and archaeological small finds. Dr Lewis is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA), a Member of the Institute for Archaeologists (MIfA) and an adviser to the All-Party Archaeological Group (APPAG). He is also a Special Police Constable with the Metropolitan Police's Art and Antiquities Unit.
   
  John McNeill lectures on mediaeval art and architecture for the Faculty of Continuing Education at Birkbeck and Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. He has led ULEMHAS tours for many years. He is the Honorary Secretary of the British Archaeological Association, and edited the Proceedings of its conference at Anjou. He was recently elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
   
  An expert in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art, Michael Michael read History of Art and Architecture at the University of East Anglia and gained his Doctorate at Westfield College, University of London. He lectured at St. Andrews University before joining Christie's Education in 1987. He has written widely on Renaissance and Medieval art including the Arezzo frescoes of Piero della Francesca, the iconography of the Apocalypse, and English illuminated manuscripts of the 13th and 14th centuries. His most recent book is The Stained Class of Canterbury Cathedral (2004).
   
  John Mitchell of the School of World Art and Museology at the University of East Anglia, is an art historian often working with archaeologists. Research has focussed on early medieval Italy, more recently in Albania in late Antiquity. His interests range over N. Europe and those cultures ringing the Mediterranean, including Byzantium and Islam. Publications include studies of monastic arts in early medieval Italy and he is currently writing on Italy and Europe in the early middle ages.
   
  Professor Janet L. Nelson – Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London and recently President of the Royal Historical Society. Most of her work has been on kingship, government and political ideas in the early Middle Ages, on which she has published extensively as well as on heresy, religion and ritual. She is currently writing a biography of Charlemagne.
   
  Mellie Naydenova-Slade is an Assistant Lecturer in the School of History at the University of Kent
   
  Catherine Parry-Wingfield has taught many courses on the fine and decorative arts including those at Birkbeck's Faculty of Continuing Education, the Open University and the Victoria & Albert Museum. She specialises in the visual arts of eighteenth century Europe and Britain.
   
  Richard Plant studied architectural history at the Courtauld Institute, where he took his MA and gained his PhD on English Romanesque and the Holy Roman Empire. He has published on English and German Romanesque architecture. He has taught at a number of institutions in London, and is currently a Course Director at Christies Education, and had led a number of study tours for Martin Randall Travel
   
  Jane Pritchard, co-curator of Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929, is Curator of Dance for the V&A. She was Archivist for Rambert Dance Company and English National Ballet, curates seasons of dance films for BFI Southbank, and contributes to numerous journals.
   
  Dr Janet Robson is an Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, and a guest lecturer for the Courtauld Institute and Christie’s Education. Janet specialises in Italian art c.1200-1450, with particular interests in iconography and the art of the Franciscans. She is currently writing a book on the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi
   
  Dr Lyn Rodley, Helen Waddell Visiting Professor at Queens' University Belfast, is well known for her work on the rock-cut churches of Cappadocia and for her introduction to Byzantine art and architecture, the Runciman prize-winning Byzantine art and architecture: an introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1994), a systematic introduction to the material culture of the Byzantine empire, from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries.
   
  Mariam Rosser-Owen is a Curator in the Middle Eastern Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, looking after the Middle Eastern collections which date before 1500. Her research interests include the Islamic Mediterranean, and she is currently preparing a book, Islamic Arts from Spain: 9th to 19th centuries, to be published by the Museum in 2010.
   
  Ashok Roy is Director of Scientific Research at the National Gallery, where he has worked on the technical study of Old Master paintings for over 30 years. His particular interests are directed to the application of scientific methods to the examination and analysis of paintings and the history of technology of European painting practice. He was involved with the technical study of Holbein’s Ambassadors during the course of its complex conservation treatment in 1993-97. He is editor of the National Gallery Technical Bulletin.
   
  Nigel Saul is Professor of Mediaeval History at Royal Holloway, University of London and he has been published extensively on medieval history and art. His books include Death, art and memory (2001), The three Richards (2005), and this year, English church monuments in the Middle Ages: history and representation.
   
  Jennifer Scott worked at National Museums Liverpool and the National Gallery London before joining the Royal Collection in January 2004, where she is Curator of Paintings. She has curated several exhibitions and is co-author of the related catalogues. Her most recent publication is The royal portrait: image and impact.
   
  Diane Silverthorne graduated from Birkbeck with a first-class degree in History of Art and was awarded her PhD by the Royal College of Art in 2010. Her research was part of the AHRC-sponsored project, The Viennese café and fin-de-siècle culture. Her research interests include art, music and modernism and she has published on these topics. She lectures widely on art and design in the modern period.
   
  Dr Andrew Spira is a Course Director at Christie's Education. He published a book on the relationship between Russian icons and Russian avant-garde art in 2008 and is currently completing a book on the material culture of personal identity, from the Middle Ages until the present day.
   
 
Jane Spooner is Curator of Historic Buildings at the Tower of London. Her background includes studying art history, conservation, heritage and interpretation. She studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art, worked as a building fabric and artworks advisor to the Church of England, and specialised in the conservation of wall paintings.
   
  Lindsay Stainton was formerly in charge of the British drawings and watercolours in the British Museum, and is currently working on a catalogue raisonné of the works of Gainsborough. She has published on Turner and on British artists in Italy.
   
  Saskia Stevens studied Classics at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She continued her study of the Ancient World at the University of Oxford. Having finished a Masters in Classical Archaeology there, she wrote a DPhil thesis on the impact of urban development on city boundaries in Roman Italy in the Late Republican and Early Imperial period. Since August 2010 she has been assistant professor in Ancient History and Classical Civilisation at Utrecht University.
   
  Joachim Strupp is an art historian with a specialisation in Italian and German art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. After ten years as a lecturer at the universities of St Andrews and Buckingham, he now lectures independently for organisations such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, the John Hall Pre-University Course in Venice, Martin Randall Travel and a number of Europe-based American academic programmes. He has published articles on Italian Renaissance art and has appeared on radio. (Biography from Arts Pursuits)
   
  Will Vaughan is President of ULEMHAS; he has recently retired as Pevsner Professor of the History of Art and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Birkbeck. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge and has taught at Yale. He has published widely on 18th and 19th century European and British painting, and is currently preparing the Samuel Palmer exhibition for the British Museum in the autumn.
   
  Leslie Webster worked at the British Museum from 1964–2007, ending up as Keeper (Head) of the Department of Prehistory and Europe. She co-curated four major Anglo-Saxon and Early Medieval exhibitions during that time. She is currently on the Research Advisory Panel for the Staffordshire Hoard Project. She has edited several monographs and published many articles on Anglo-Saxon art and archaeology.
   
  Richard Williams gained his doctorate at the Courtauld Institute and is an associate lecturer at Birkbeck College. He lectures there and at the National Gallery. He has been awarded a Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to write a book on the changing images of Christ during the European Reformation.
   
  Lucy Worsley, now Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, was formerly English Heritage's Inspector of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings for Bolsover Castle, home of the junior branch of the Cavendish family, and worked on the re-presentation of the site in the early 2000s. Her PhD thesis, 'The Architectural Patronage of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, 1593-1676', was published by Faber and Faber in 2007 as Cavalier, A Tale of Passion, Chivalry and Great Houses. . She is married to an architect.
   
  A native of Jiangsu, China, Hongxing Zhang became Senior Curator of Chinese Collections at the V&A in 2004. He has curated several major exhibitions over the last few years, including the ground-breaking China Design Now at the V&A in 2008. He is an art historian with expertise in the history of Chinese painting in the 18th and 19th centuries.
   
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Updated: 09 February 2012