Keynotes
Caroline van Eck studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, and classics and philosophy at Leiden University. In 1994 she obtained her PhD in aesthetics (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam. She has taught at the Universities of Amsterdam, Groningen and Leiden, where she was appointed Professor of Art and Architectural History in 2006. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art at Yale University, and a Visiting Professor in Ghent, Yale and York. In September 2016 she took up her appointment as Professor of Art History at Cambridge, and in 2017 she will give the Slade Lectures in Oxford.
Her main research interests are art and architectural history and theory of the eighteenth century; the relations between rhetoric and the arts; the anthropological and psychological aspects of the impact art works exercise on those involved with them; and processes of stylistic and cultural transfer considered from the perspective of the agency of artefacts.
Claudia Cieri Via is Senior Lecturer in Art Historiography at Sapienza University in Rome, where she teaches both for the Scuola di Specializzazione (MA) and the PhD programme. She was visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Princeton (USA) (1995) and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociale of Paris (2000); Fulbright distinguish visiting Professor at the Northwester University of Chicago (2009), and Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies for visual Arts of Washington (2010). Among her publications there are: Nei dettagli nascosto. Per una storia del pensiero iconologico, Carocci (1994), n.e. 2009. She also edited the volumes: Lo sguardo di Giano. Aby Warburg fra tempo e memoria, (in coll. P. Montani), Aragno 2006; Aby Warburg e la cultura italiana, (in coll. M. Forti), Mondadori 2009; Mantegna e Roma, Bulzoni 2009; Meyer Schapiro e i metodi della storia dell’arte, Mimesis, 2010.
Gestaltpsychologie
Barret Reiter is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Cambridge, working on a dissertation tentatively entitled ‘The Politics of the Confessional Imagination, from Calvin to Hobbes’. He previously completed an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the same institution. Both his MPhil and the current project examine the contested nature of the imagination, and the mind more generally, within the discourse of academic natural philosophy (both Catholic and Protestant), as well as in more informal contexts such as vernacular medical treatises, poems, political pamphlets, and sermons. Barret has presented his research at numerous occasions in both Cambridge and London on various aspects of early modern political thought and the nature of imagination. He currently serves as co-convener of the Graduate Workshop in Political Thought and Intellectual History in Cambridge and helped organise the 2018 Cambridge Graduate Conference: ‘Aesthetics and Poetics in the History of Political Thought’.
Sascha Freyberg grew up in East Berlin and studied cultural sciences and philosophy in Hagen and Berlin. He has worked for the Collegium for the Advanced Study of Picture Act and Embodiment and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Currently he is a research fellow and editorial manager at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice working for the ERC research group Early Modern Cosmology.
Paolo Gervasi is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, working on a project on the presence of caricatures and deformations in Italian literary texts. He graduated and obtained his PhD in Italian Literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he also worked as a post-doc. He has published two monographs on the history and theory of literary criticism (Vita contro letteratura. Cesare Garboli: un’idea della critica, 2018; La forma dell’eresia. Giacomo Debenedetti 1922–1934: storia di un inizio, 2012). He has also published on the relations between visual and literary cultures, on the representation of emotions in literature, on the study of both Renaissance and contemporary Italian literature from a neurocognitive perspective, and on critical methodologies enabled by both cognitive studies and the digital humanities. He runs a personal blog dedicated to his current research and other research-related issues: https://blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk/litcaricature/
Pathosformeln
Lot Brouwer, born and raised in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, has always been fascinated by cross-cultural and cross-religious exchange and relations. It led her to complete bachelor’s degrees in both History and Religious Studies, followed by a two-year research master’s in the latter, all at the University of Amsterdam. During these years, she developed an increasing interest in the way in which the Islamic religion has been studied by European scholars, and in how the fields of oriental and Islamic studies have been influenced by European Christianity and especially the Reformation. In 2015 she was admitted as a PhD student to the Erasmus Mundus programme ‘Text and Event in Early Modern Europe’ (TEEME) at the University of Kent and the Freie Universitat Berlin, doing research on the use of knowledge about Islam in the age of confessionalization after the Reformation.
Laurence Garneau holds a master’s degree in art history and is currently a PhD candidate at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Her thesis will explore the astrological frescos located at the Palazzo della Ragione (Padua), under the direction of Itay Sapir. Her works on medieval and Renaissance representation of sciences in art, especially concerning astrology and time as a social paradigm, attest to her interests in historiographical aspects of the discipline. Laurence Garneau is the recipient of research grants from bodies including the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (2017) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (2018). She is also the scientific coordinator of the Conférences Hypothèses based at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and works as an art educator at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art.
Eleonora Andriani is an international PhD student in medieval philosophy (Università del Salento, Universität zu Köln). Previously, she was a research assistant at the Thomas-Institut der Universität zu Köln (September 2015–March 2016) on the project Maimonides Latinus. In Cologne, she was awarded an additional predoctoral fellowship by a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne (October 2015–March 2016). She is a member of CETEFIL: Centro per l’edizione di testi filosofici medievali e rinascimentali and is currently an occasional student at the Warburg Institute of the University of London (October 2016–September 2018). Her PhD research consists of the critical edition of the Prohemium of the Liber introductorius of Michael Scot under the supervision of Professor Alessandra Beccarisi (Università del Salento) and Professor Andreas Speer (Universität zu Köln). Her research field includes philosophy, astrology, demonology and history of magic in the Middle Ages.
Verknüpfungszwang
Dimitrios Roussos holds a BA in Archaeology and Art History from the Department of History and Archaeology, University of Crete. Awarded an Onassis Foundation Scholarship for Hellenes (2017–18) and a UCL IoA Masters Award, he has recently completed his MA in Comparative Art and Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology (IoA), University College London (UCL). He has participated in fieldwork research in the Palaeolithic caves of southern France (Lascaux, Chauvet, Rouffignac, etc.), as well as at major cultural, historical and archaeological sites across the Valley of Mexico. During the academic year 2015–16 he worked as a research assistant in the Art History section of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies – Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (IMS-FORTH). His current research focuses on the institutional background of early colonial Mexican artists and the interactive dialogue between European Renaissance and indigenous Mexican art and culture in the aftermath of the conquest of Mexico.
Thomas Hughes completed his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in July 2018 on the art writings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater and the art of the Aesthetic Movement, especially James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Arguing that some art-historical processes occur in the language that has come to be used to describe art, Thomas’s thesis considers Ruskin’s and Pater’s uses of seven key art terms, and explores how Ruskin was appropriated and transformed by Pater and Aestheticism. In 2016 he was co-editor-in-chief of immediations: The Courtauld Institute of Art’s Journal of Postgraduate Research, taking the journal online and open access in addition to print. In early 2018 he was Brian Allen Visiting Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. Thomas has given papers at conferences in the UK, France and Italy.
Felix Martin studied architecture in Aachen and Dublin. He specialised in architectural history and worked in research projects on medieval and Renaissance architecture in Italy, Belgium and Germany. In 2016 he graduated at RWTH Aachen University, where he afterwards lectured and taught architectural history and design studio. He continued to teach at the School of Architecture at Taliesin (USA) in 2017, while his efforts for a PhD on Dublin’s Casino at Marino and Enlightenment architecture resulted in his current research stay at Trinity College Dublin and the Warburg Institute in London. Felix Martin’s research was awarded the Mary Vidal Memorial Award by the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture and is currently funded by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation). In addition, he works on projects with Denis Byrne Architects (Dublin) and is part of the emerging research project baureka.online (RWTH Aachen and TU Berlin) which aims to establish an online platform for archiving and sharing data from historical building research and architectural conservation.