Empathy and evolution: the history of emotions and the literary and visual representation of animals. A study of emotions in human and animals is a key area of contemporary research in both the sciences and humanities. It has crucial implications for our future. This project will investigate how humans have represented the emotions in literary and visual discourses from the eighteenth-century to the present.
Orientalism of the Mediterranean shore: art and place from Tunis to Marseille. This project focuses on new ways of thinking about how art links North Africa and Europe. Researching the images of Tunis, Algiers, Granada and Marseille in painting and photography (between 1880-1950) will lead to high-level outputs; beginning with a 2014 exhibition on Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter as Orientalists.
Artists as collectors of Islamic Art, 1850-1910. The aim of this project is to generate a new understanding of patterns of collecting and interpreting the arts of the near east through the first cross-cultural comparative study of Ottoman and Orientalist artists as collectors in the 19th century. By mapping transcultural networks of artists, dealers and collectors traversing Ottoman, Russian, Polish, French and British cultures, this study reveals international exchanges that have been occluded ....Artists as collectors of Islamic Art, 1850-1910. The aim of this project is to generate a new understanding of patterns of collecting and interpreting the arts of the near east through the first cross-cultural comparative study of Ottoman and Orientalist artists as collectors in the 19th century. By mapping transcultural networks of artists, dealers and collectors traversing Ottoman, Russian, Polish, French and British cultures, this study reveals international exchanges that have been occluded by studies of Orientalism narrowly focused around single national histories. This project reveals the myriad ways treasures from the Islamic world were being transformed in the 19th century from their prior local religious and cultural functions into exoticism in the West and cultural patrimony in the East.Read moreRead less
Visual cosmopolitanism, national identity and imperialist ambitions in garden spaces. Visual cosmopolitanism is an ideal created through the global movement of art forms. This project will contribute to current debates about the globalisation of art by tracing the concept back to artistic practices and aesthetic theories of the enlightenment through a focus on experience within the eighteenth-century garden.