Lecturer Biographies
The following alphabetical list shows the biographies of speakers who have lectured Society at Society events during the last three years. Please note that the biographies were believed to be accurate when posted, but may not be complete if the subject is not a contributor to the current programme.
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Biographies of Lecturers
Thomas Abbott
Thomas Abbott is an independent art and architectural historian, who has lived in Berlin for over thirty years. 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 including several for the London Art History Society.
Professor Anne Anderson
Professor Anne Anderson lectured on the Fine Arts Valuation degree courses, Southampton Solent University. She is currently Hon. Associate Professor at Exeter University and a tutor for the V&A Learning Academy. She has published books on Roman pottery, Art Deco teapots and Edward Burne-Jones. Anne lectures for many galleries and art history societies.
Malcolm Andrews
Malcolm Andrews is Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent, and Editor of The Dickensian (the journal of the Dickens Fellowship). He has published books on Dickens and also on landscape in literature and the visual arts. The latter includes The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain 1760-1800 (1989); Landscape and Western Art (Oxford History of Art Series (1999); and, currently near completion, A Sweet View: Picturesque Landscape in Nineteenth-Century England (Reaktion Books, 2020/21).
Kate Aspinall
Dr Kate Aspinall is both an art historian and an artist. She studied art history at St Andrew’s, The Courtauld and the University of East Anglia, from where she was awarded her doctorate in 2003. She has worked on the Feliks Topolski archive and the Roy Lichtenstein Catalogue Raisonné. She has written widely on the art, artists and the artistic debates of the twentieth-century and lectures for the Art Society, The Courtauld Summer Schools and the Paul Mellon Foundation.
Jessica Barker
DrJessica Parker is a specialist in medieval art, with a particular emphasis on sculpture. She studied at the University of Oxford and The Courtauld Institute of Art, where she was subsequently Henry Moore Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined The Courtauld in 2018, after two years teaching at the University of East Anglia.
Dr Clare Barlow
Dr Clare Barlow curated the National Portrait Gallery’s widely-acclaimed 2013 display ‘Jacob Epstein: Portrait Sculptor’. She first joined the Gallery as a PhD student in 2005 and returned as an Assistant Curator for the 18th and 20th Centuries in 2011. She now works as an Assistant Curator at Tate Britain and has made appearances in television arts programmes on BBC2 and BBC4.
Mariska Beekenkamp-Wladimiroff
Mariska Beekenkamp-Wladimiroff, a psychologist by trade, finished her MA in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art while having her third baby. Since graduating she has been organising and giving lectures while dividing her time between London, New York and Amsterdam.
Suzannah Biernoff
Suzannah Biernoff joined Birkbeck in 2007 as a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Visual Culture, having previously taught on the Visual Culture programme at Middlesex University and at Chelsea College of Art & Design. Her research has spanned medieval and modern periods: she completed her PhD in Sydney, Australia (it was published in 2002 as Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages), and currently works on war and visual culture in early twentieth-century Britain. Her book Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement is due out later this year.
Roger Billcliffe
Roger Billcliffe is a leading expert on Scottish art. He has published extensively on the Glasgow Boys and Charles Rennie Mackintosh as well as the Scottish Colourists. He was one of the curators of the Glasgow Boys exhibition at Kelvingrove and the Royal Academy. He also runs his own gallery in Glasgow.
Linda Bolton
Linda Bolton is one of Art History UK’s leading exhibition guides and is a highly experienced and senior art historian and a curator at Tate Britain. Linda has published a dozen books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists and art movements, and is currently writing a graphic novel on the French artist Elizabeth Vigée le Brun.
Timothy Brittain-Catlin
Timothy Brittain-Catlin is the author of The English Parsonage in the Early Nineteenth Century (2008) and, most recently, of Bleak Houses (MIT Press 2014), a critique of recent methods of architectural history and theory. He has been a regular contributor to The World of Interiors for more than 25 years. He is Reader in Architecture at the Kent School of Architecture, University of Kent.
Caroline Brooke
Caroline Brooke is an art historian specialising in Renaissance art. She lectures at the National Gallery, the V&A and teaches courses at the Courtauld. Caroline is an Art Society lecturer and has completed a lecture tour of Australia. Her publications include articles for the Burlington Magazine, Master Drawings and book reviews for The Art Newspaper and Art Quarterly.
Peter Bryden
Following a degree in Biochemistry and Physiology Peter Bryden qualified as a doctor and practiced as a GP in Hastings until 2010. Wishing to further his interest in the History of Art he enrolled at Birkbeck and was awarded an MA in 2012. His special interest is Victorian Art and he wrote his dissertation on Social Realism and the Victorian Poverty Industry. He lectures on this area for a range of educational courses.
Caroline Campbell
Caroline Campbell is Curator of Italian Paintings before 1500 at The National Gallery. She is working on two exhibition projects for 2014, one of which examines architecture, its meaning and purpose in Italian Renaissance Painting. Prior to taking up her appointment at the National Gallery, she was Schroder Foundation Curator of Paintings at The Courtauld Gallery from 2005-12.
Dr Antonia Gatward Cevizli
Dr Antonia Gatward Cevizli is an independent art historian who teaches for the V&A Academy, The Courtauld Institute of Art Summer School and the National Gallery. Her publications focus on cultural and diplomatic exchange between the Italian city-states and the Ottomans. She has lived in Siena, Venice and Istanbul.
Dr Jacqueline Cockburn
Dr Jacqueline Cockburn is a course director and lecturer at the V&A and also lectures at The Royal Academy, the Art Fund, Artscapades, the London Art History Society, The Arts Society and a number of private institutions. Jacqueline is Managing Director of Art and Culture Andalucía. She has recently published A Taste of Art, London (Unicorn Press, 2019).
Dr Carlo Corsato
Dr Carlo Corsato is an Educator at the National Gallery, London and teaches at Morley College, London. He was Visiting Lecturer at the University of Buckingham and Visiting Scholar at St John College, Cambridge. Carlo is a specialist in early-modern European art and architecture, with an expertise in Venetian painting. Among his publications are Lives of Titian and Lives of Tintoretto (Pallas Athene/Getty Publications, 2019).
Nora Courtney
A former Extra-Mural Lecturer at Birkbeck.
Jan D. Cox
Jan D. Cox was awarded a BA at Oxford Brookes University, where he won the Jeanne Sheehy Memorial Prize, and an MA at the University of Bristol. He was formerly chief researcher for a project that placed online Wyndham Lewis’s art criticism in The Listener, and has since been awarded a PhD scholarship by the University of Leeds. His PhD concentrates on nineteenth-century Scandinavian art and its links with Europe, and will be complete by September 2014. He has lectured extensively – including on Scandinavian and Canadian Art – at conferences in Oslo, Copenhagen and Montreal, and at Tate Britain, Tate St. Ives and the Courtauld Institute.
Lucy Cutler
Lucy Cutler completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2003. She has taught at The Courtauld Institute of Art, Cambridge University, The Open University and City University. Her publications include Representing an Alternative Empire at the Court of Cardinal Federico Borromeo in Habsburg Milan in The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety and Art 1450-1700 ed Mary Hollingsworth et al and Virtue and Diligence; Jan Brueghel and Federico Borromeo in Virtus; Virtuositeit en kunstliefhebbers in de Nederlanden 1500-1700 in Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 2003 Deel 54 ed Jan de Jong et al.
Bridget Daly
Bridget Daly has worked at the Museum of London in Visitor Experience for six and a half years, researching and writing her own talks and tours, both internal and external tours, mainly concentrating on the eighteenth century. She has also conducted tours at The Charterhouse and The Foundling Museum.
Ken Dark
Ken Dark 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.
Dr Glyn Davies
Dr Glyn Davies FSA is curator responsible for late medieval sculpture at the V&A. He has published widely on medieval and renaissance sculpture, metalwork and textiles, and was the lead curator for the medieval spaces in the Medieval & Renaissance Galleries redevelopment at the V&A (opened 2009). He is currently developing the English Opus Anglicanum exhibition for 2016. He is the co-author of Medieval Ivory Carvings: 1200-1550 (with Paul Williamson) and Medieval and Renaissance Art: People and Possessions (with Kirsten Kennedy)
Michael Douglas‑Scott
Michael Douglas‑Scott is an Associate Lecturer in History of Art at Birkbeck College, specialising in 16th-century Italian art and architecture. He studied at the Courtauld and Birkbeck College, University of London, lived in Rome for several years and leads many tours for Martin Randall. He has written articles for Arte Veneta, Burlington Magazine and the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes.
Peter Draper
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.
Dr Antony Eastman
Dr Antony Eastmond read History at Oxford, before coming to The Courtauld where he took his MA in Byzantine art and PhD in art in medieval Georgia. After working at The Courtauld Institute and Warwick he returned to The Courtauld as Reader in the History of Byzantine Art in 2004. He has written extensively on Byzantine art and a monograph entitled Byzantine and East Christian Art is due for publication in 2013.
Fiona Gilmore Eaves
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
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.
Dr Katie Faulkner
Dr Katie Faulkner took her first degree at University College London where she was awarded the E H Gombrich prize for History of Art. Her MA and Ph.D were done at the Courtauld Institute where she is currently a Visiting Lecturer. She also lectures at the University of Warwick and Arcadia, the College of Global Studies. She regularly gives talks at the Courtauld Gallery and co-ordinates the widening participation programme, encouraging state school students to study history of art.
Eric Fernie
Eric Fernie has held the posts of Professor of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh and Director of The Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London. His books include The Architecture of the Anglo-Saxons (1983), An Architectural History of Norwich Cathedral (1993), Art History and its Methods (1995), The Architecture of Norman England (2000), and Romanesque Architecture: the First Style of the European Age (2014).
Clare Ford-Wille
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 V&A and The Arts Society groups in Britain and Europe. She has led many tours abroad. Clare is a Vice President of The London Art History Society.
Dr Alexandra Gajewski
Dr Alexandra Gajewski is Reviews Editor of the Burlington Magazine and 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 completed a PhD in Gothic architecture in Northern Burgundy at the Courtauld Institute and is currently leading tours with a number of organisations.
Christina Grande
Christina Grande is Senior Lecturer in Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Winchester. She has also taught Greek and Roman Art and Architecture, Classical Mythology, and the later reception of Classical art for Birkbeck for many years. Christina has also been a lecturer in Classical Art for the University of Leicester and for the Open University, and has also lectured for the British Museum Education Service, the National Gallery, Morley College, the City Literary Institute, as well for The London Art History Society.
Tag Gronberg
Tag Gronberg is Emeritus Reader in the History of Art and Design who taught mainly in the modern period (nineteenth century to the present). Her research interests lie in the area of gender and modernism, and particularly in projects that range across art, design and architecture. She has published books on late 19th- and early 20th-century visual culture in France and in Austria. She was Departmental Postgraduate Research Tutor, helping to organise the research culture of the Department and in charge of MPhil/PhD admissions.
Jim Harris
Jim Harris is Andrew W Mellon Foundation Teaching Curator, leading the Ashmolean’s academic engagement programmes across the curriculum of the University of Oxford.
He trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and as an art historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he wrote his PhD thesis on the polychrome sculpture of Donatello, under the supervision of Professor Patricia Rubin. He subsequently held the Courtauld’s Andrew W Mellon Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Caroline Villers Research Fellowship in Conservation.
Dr Paula Henderson
Dr Paula Henderson is an independent scholar who specializes in the architectural and garden history of Tudor and Stuart Britain. She has a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she teaches in the summer school. Her many publications include over fifty articles in journals and in collections of essays. Her book, The Tudor House and Garden: Architecture and Landscape in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Yale, 2005), won the Berger Prize for British Art History.
Gijs van Hensbergen
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, including Gaudí, a biography (2001), Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-century Icon (2005) and The Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s Heaven on Earth (2017). Presently he is writing a book on the great American art collectors. (See his website for a fuller biography.)
Julia Hutt
Julia Hutt is Curator of Japanese art in the Asian Department of the V&A, specialising in the arts of the Edo period, in particular lacquerware and ivory carvings. She also teaches widely on various courses, most notably at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. She has published extensively on various aspects of Japanese art, including lacquer, prints and netsuke. Her main publications include Understanding Far Eastern Art (Phaidon 1987), Japanese Inrō (V&A 1997) and Japanese Netsuke (V&A 2003). She is currently working on a book on Japanese lacquer based on the V&A’s internationally renowned collection.
Dr Laura Jacobus
Dr Laura Jacobus completed 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).
Dr Lucy Jessop
Dr Lucy Jessop is a Senior Investigator in the Research Group of Historic England (formerly English Heritage). She is an architectural historian with a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art on architectural patronage by government ministers from 1688 to 1714. She teaches aspects of 17th and 18th-century British architecture for Historic England and for the Courtauld.
Dr Helen Langdon
Dr Helen Langdon is the author of Caravaggio: A Life (1998); Caravaggio’s Cardsharps: Trickery and Illusion (2012); and editor of The Lives of Caravaggio, Mancini, Bellori and Baglione. She has been on the curatorial committee of various Caravaggio exhibitions. Formerly Assistant Director of the British School at Rome she is now a freelance writer, lecturer and curator.
Frederica Law-Turner
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.
Revd Dr Ayla Lepine
Revd Dr Ayla Lepine is Associate Rector at St James’s, Piccadilly, London. She was the 2021-22 Ahmanson Fellow in Art and Religion at the National Gallery where she was curator for Fruits of the Spirit: Art from the Heart. She publishes and lectures widely on theology’s relationships with art history.
John McNeill
John McNeill lectures for the Department of Continuing Education at Oxford University and is a Vice-President of the London Art History Society for whom he has delivered numerous courses and led study tours and cathedral visits. He is the Secretary of the British Archaeological Association, for whom he has edited and contributed to volumes on English medieval cloisters, chantries and Romanesque material culture.
Charlotte de Mille
Dr Charlotte de Mille curates the music programme for The Courtauld Gallery. She received her doctorate from The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2009 and has taught there and at the Universities of Sussex, Bristol, and St Andrews. She is editor of Music and Modernism (2011) and co-editor of Bergson and the Art of Immanence (2013).
Dr Lesley Milner
Dr Lesley Milner trained as an art historian and worked as an associate lecturer for the Open University. She recently completed a part-time PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art. The title of her thesis is Secret spaces: English sacristies, vestries and treasure rooms, 1066-1300 and is due to be published in 2022.
Nicola Moorby
Nicola Moorby (MA, BA) is an independent art historian specialising in British art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A former curator and researcher at Tate Britain, she has curated a number of exhibitions and published widely on J.M.W. Turner, including for the current on-line updated catalogue of the Turner Bequest. She is also co-editor and author of How to Paint Like Turner (Tate Publishing 2010). In addition to Turner she has published on Walter Richard Sickert and is co-author of the Tate’s catalogue of works by the Camden Town Group.
Anna Moszynska
Anna Moszynska is a lecturer and writer, specialising in contemporary art. She developed the first British MA Degree in the subject at Sotheby’s Institute and has also taught at institutions including the Royal Academy and Tate, as well as lecturing to diverse audiences in cities ranging from Dubai to New York. She has reviewed for BBC Radio and various art periodicals. Anna currently teaches at academic institutions in London and Paris and runs her own courses under the auspices of Contemporary Art Talks. Her books include Abstract Art, Sculpture Now (Thames & Hudson) and Antony Gormley Drawings (British Museum).
Dr Katarzyna (Kasia) Murawska-Muthesius
Dr Katarzyna (Kasia) Murawska-Muthesius is an Associate lecturer at Birkbeck. Born in Poland, she was Curator of Italian Paintings, the Chief Curator, and Deputy Director of the National Museum in Warsaw. She joined Birkbeck in 2000, teaching and co-managing the Certificate of Higher Education in the History of Art. She has also lectured in universities in Italy, France, Germany and the US. Her books include Trionfo Barocco (1990), Companion Guide to the National Museum in Warsaw (1998), Borders in Art, or revising Kunstgeographie (2000), Kantor was here (2011). Her current research focuses on caricature.
Dr Natalia Murray
Dr Natalia Murray graduated from the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg before taking the PhD course at the Hermitage. Over the past eight years she has been lecturing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian Art at The Courtauld and at the University of Sussex. She curated Revolution. Russian Art. 1917-1932 at the RA and lead a Society study day, Art at the time of the Revolution, to link with the exhibition. Natalia is also a trustee of the Russian Avant-Garde Research Project.
Dr Mellie Naydenova-Slade
Dr Mellie Naydenova-Slade is a specialist in medieval art history with a particular interest in wall paintings – a subject on which she has published a number of recent articles. She is currently completing a monograph based on her PhD thesis on the iconography of the Holy Kinship – the extended family of Christ stemming from St Anne. She works as a freelance lecturer at institutions including the Courtauld Institute, Birkbeck College, the University of Kent and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art.
David Nice
David Nice writes, lectures and broadcasts on music. A former music critic for The Guardian and The Sunday Correspondent, he is a regular voice on BBC Radio 3. He has written short studies on Elgar, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky and the history of opera, and is currently working on the second volume of his Prokofiev biography for Yale University Press. He runs his own lecture series, Opera in Depth, at the Frontline Club in Paddington.
Dr Geoffrey Nuttall
Dr Geoffrey Nuttall has several degrees including an MA in History of Art from Birkbeck and a PhD from the Courtauld. He is a specialist in the Courts of Europe and their dealings with the merchants of luxury goods. He lectures at the V&A and international conferences, and recently held a fellowship at the Huntington Collections and Art Gallery in California.
Dr Paula Nuttall
Dr Paula Nuttall wrote her doctoral thesis on the reception of Netherlandish painting in fifteenth-century Florence. She is a specialist in artistic relations between Italy and Northern Europe. Her acclaimed book is From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting, 1400-1500 (Yale University Press, 2004). Paula is Director of the V&A Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Year Course. She lectures for a range of other UK institutions and societies.
Maeve O’Donnell-Morales
Maeve O’Donnell-Morales studied at New York University and Hunter College and is currently finishing her doctorate at the Courtauld. She worked as a Legal Assistant in the Vice President’s Office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for four years and has given art history courses for Hunter College and other New York based organisations, as well as lecturing at the Courtauld Gallery.
John Onians
John Onians is Emeritus Professor at the University of East Anglia. He was trained first as a historian of European art before becoming interested in the study of art as a worldwide phenomenon. It was this that led him to turn to neuroscience. His next book will be European Art: A Neuroarthistory.
Zoë Opačić
Zoë Opačić was appointed lecturer in History and Theory of Architecture at Birkbeck in 2004. She received her BA and MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she also completed her PhD in 2003. Her doctoral thesis was on the Emmaus Monastery in Prague. She has taught at Morley College and the Courtauld Institute, and prior to her appointment at Birkbeck, she was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge. She is currently writing a book on the art and architecture of late medieval Prague.
Tricia Passes
Tricia Passes has a BA (Hons) from The Courtauld and an MA in Visual Culture from Bath Spa University. She has worked at Bristol UWE and Oxford Department for Continuing Education as well as American University Study Programmes. She is currently a Senior Teaching Associate at Bristol University in the Department of Art History and Historical Studies. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and visual culture in Europe and the USA.
Dr Lucy Peltz
Dr Lucy Peltz has been Curator of 18th Century Collections at the National Portrait Gallery since 2001. She co-curated the following exhibitions and contributed to the research and writing of their accompanying publications: Brilliant Women. 18th Century Bluestockings (2008), Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance (2010) andThe First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons (2011)
Leslie Primo
Leslie Primo specialises in early Medieval and Renaissance studies. He is a lecturer and tutor at the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, Imperial College and Reading University. He also gives gallery tours at the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, both Tate galleries and the V&A. Leslie lectures for many art history societies in the UK including The Arts Society, Art in Focus and the Art Fund and regularly teaches courses at the City Lit and Bishopsgate Institute.
Jane Pritchard
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 Janina Ramirez
Oxford academic Dr Janina Ramirez is a medieval historian. She presented Treasures of the Anglo- Saxons on BBC Four in 2010 and since then she has presented documentaries on Icelandic literature (The Viking Sagas) and the stained glass of York Minster (Britain’s Most Fragile Treasure). She has written and presented a three-part series on the Royal Manuscripts collection of the British Library (Illuminations:The Private Lives of Medieval Kings), and fronted programmes on The Hundred Years’ War (Chivalry and Betrayal) and the first Gothic age (Architects of the Divine). Her book, Private Lives of the Saints: Power, Passion and Politics in Anglo-Saxon England, was published in 2015.
Kate Retford
Kate Retford joined Birkbeck in 2003. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century British art, especially portraiture, issues of gender and the country house. Kate’s most recent monograph The Conversation Piece – making modern art in Eighteenth-Century Britain was published in 2017. In 2020, she recorded a podcast Marketing the British Country House as Home and contributed an essay to the Paul Mellon Centre’s online publication Art and the British Country House.
Dr Lyn Rodley
Dr Lyn Rodley is an Associate Lecturer with the Open University and has taught a broad range of topics in Byzantine art and architecture at several other institutions, including Morley College in London, the Universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Queen’s University, Belfast, where she was Helen Waddell Visiting Professor 2003-2006. She is the author of Byzantine Art and Architecture: An Introduction (Cambridge 1994).
Chris Rogers
Chris Rogers writes and speaks on architecture and visual culture. His new book, How to Read London – a crash course in London architecture (Ivy Press), is now available and is a follow-up to his How to Read Paris (2016) from the same publisher. He recently delivered the session on contemporary London for The London Society’s Architecture School. Chris is a member of the British architectural education and protection society the Twentieth Century Society, running tours, writing for its publications and assisting its casework. His work can also be found at www.chrismrogers.net.
Shahed Saleem
Shahed Saleem is a practising architect and teaches architecture at the University of Westminster. His particular research interests centre around the architecture of post-colonial diaspora communities in the UK, and in particular their relationship to notions of heritage, belonging and nationhood. His book, The British Mosque: an architectural and social history, was published by Historic England in 2018. He won a commendation at the RIBA President’s Medal for research, has been nominated for the V&A Jameel Prize 2013 and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2016.
Dr Niccola Shearman
Dr Niccola Shearman is a lecturer in twentieth-century German and Austrian art. She has held posts at the University of Manchester and The Courtauld, where she completed a PhD on the modernist woodcut in Germany and where she contributes regularly to public courses and study tours. Academic articles reflect research interests in print histories and the psychology of vision, and she also publishes regular book reviews and translations.
John Schofield
John Schofield is Cathedral Archaeologist for St Paul’s, and has recently published a large archaeological report on the cathedral and its site from earliest times to 1666. He was an archaeologist and architectural historian at the Museum of London from 1974 until 2008. He has produced several well-received books about medieval London and medieval towns in Britain.
Diane Silverthorne
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.
Elizabeth Singleton
Elizabeth Singleton has been working in the heritage sector for the past ten years. Currently she holds the post of Sales Account Manager in a large London museum. In her spare time she leads tours on a freelance basis for various organisations and tours which focus on social history and public art.
Dr Andrew Spira
Dr Andrew Spira is an Art Historian who studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art and City University, London. He was a specialist in Byzantine and Russian icons at the Temple Gallery, London, before working as a curator at the V&A Museum and was subsequently Programme Director at Christie’s Education, His recent publications include The Invention of the Self: Personal Identity in the Age of Art (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) and Simulated Selves: The Undoing of Personal Identity in the Modern World (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
Jenny Stratford
Jenny Stratford began her career as an Assistant Keeper in the Department of Manuscripts, The British Museum (now The British Library). Her research and publications have focused on two main areas: medieval and modern manuscripts, and on princely collections of the later middle ages in England and France. She is especially concerned to explore the political, economic and cultural implications of royal and princely inventories and to use visual evidence in interpreting them. She currently teaches palaeography and manuscript studies to MA and PhD students of the university. Besides catalogues of manuscripts in the British Library, and in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, and many articles on manuscript subjects published in England and in France, she has contributed chapters to The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (1999), and to The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (2006). Among her other books is The Bedford Inventories: the Worldly Goods of John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France (1389–1435) (London, 1993). Her book, Richard II and the English Royal Treasure, was published in 2012).
Ben Street
Ben Street is a freelance art historian, lecturer and writer. He lectures on modern and contemporary art for Tate, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Christie’s Education and the Royal Academy. He is the author of interpretative materials for major exhibitions at Tate, the Royal Academy and the National Gallery and has contributed essays for museum and gallery publications across the world. Ben’s recent book is How to enjoy Art.
Leslie Topp
Leslie Topp is Reader in History of Architecture in the Department of History of Art. Her teaching encompasses art, architecture, design and urbanism from 1800 to the present, with a particular focus on Central Europe around 1900. She joined Birkbeck in 2005 and was previously Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Leslie was appointed Head of Department in 2017. Her latest book is entitled: Freedom and the Cage: modern architecture and psychiatry in Central Europe, 1890-1914.
Will Vaughan
Will Vaughan is the Honorary President of The London Art History Society. He has been Emeritus Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck since 2003. His main area of research is Romanticism. 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. Since the 1980s, he has also had a strong interest in computer applications in the History of Art. He was founder of CHArt (Computers and the History of Art) in 1985.
Siân Walters
Siân Walters is an art historian and a lecturer at the National Gallery. She also lectures for Surrey University, The Arts Society and other art societies in the UK and Europe, and leads art and architecture tours abroad for a number of companies and organisations including the Royal Academy, Kirker, and her own company, “Art History in Focus”. Her specialist areas are fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian Art, Spanish Art and Architecture, and the relationship between Dance and Art. She has given many specially commissioned lectures on this topic for the National Gallery, including one in conjunction with the gallery’s recent Leonardo: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition. Recently she represented the National Gallery at the international Hay Festival where she gave a number of presentations on the gallery’s recent Titian acquisitions. Siân studied at Cambridge University where she was awarded a choral exhibition and a First for her dissertation on the paintings of Arnold Schoenberg. She has lived in France and Italy where she worked for the eminent Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon and for the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice.
Giulia Martina Weston
Giulia Martina Weston holds a PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art, where she has been Associate Lecturer since 2016. She is Consultant Lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art and an independent art consultant. Her publications focus on various aspects of Renaissance and Early Modern art and society, and on issues of connoisseurship and authenticity.
Lucy Worsley
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.
Jonathan Yarker
Jonathan Yarker leads research for the London gallery, Lowell Libson Ltd. He has recently completed a PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge and has a considerable reputation as a scholar of British painting and the Grand Tour. He has published widely, contributing to a number of publications on the Grand Tour including: Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth Century Rome (Yale, 2010); The English Prize, the capture of the Westmorland, an incident of the Grand Tour (Yale, 2012) and the recent exhibition: Richard Wilson (1713-82): A European Master (Yale 2014). Jonny has held academic fellowships in America, London, and most recently, Rome. He is currently working on an account of the life and activities of the banker and dealer Thomas Jenkins (1722 – 1798) entitled The Business of the Grand Tour.
Michaela Zöschg
Michaela Zöschg currently works as research assistant for the exhibition Opus Anglicanum: Masterpieces of English Medieval Embroidery, which will open at the V&A in September 2016. She is also conducting PhD research at The Courtauld Institute of Art, working on a research project provisionally entitled Rich Queens, Poor Clares: Art, Space and Audience in Royal Clarissan Foundations of Late Medieval Europe.