Staff Research Activities

Sarah Victoria Turner Acting Director

Sarah’s research activities this year have been dominated by preparations for a major new exhibition and publication, Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends. The exhibition, co-curated with Hammad Nasar (Senior Research Fellow, PMC) and Amy Tobin, will open at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, in November 2023. The exhibition and book are two outcomes of the London, Asia research project, which has received special project funding approved by the Centre’s Board of Governors. London, Asia is reported on in more detail in the Special Projects section of this report.

Sarah also contributed the essay ‘Frederick Cayley Robinson: Mystical Modern’ to the catalogue accompanying the Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries: British Art, 1880–1930 exhibition at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum. She was invited to give a keynote lecture at the conference in September 2022, exploring the work of the artists featured in the exhibition.

Beyond the Centre, Sarah continued to serve on the advisory boards of the Warburg Institute and Tate Etc., providing her expertise in arts management, research development and publishing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Sria Chatterjee

Head of Research & Learning

This year saw Sria laying the intellectual groundwork and ideas for the research project, Climate & Colonialism, launched at the Paul Mellon Centre in 2023. Her continuing research on the relationship between the arts, histories of colonialism, capitalism and environmental justice will feed into and be enriched by the project’s many collaborations and planned outcomes, both for scholarly and wider communities.

For the Museums Journal’s special issue on climate justice, Sria contributed the essay ‘Climate and Colonialism’, which opened up a conversation about the interconnected nature of colonial expansion and the longer history of natural and human exploitation, and the need to acknowledge the many ways in which it lives on in our institutions and lives today.

For a special issue on viral theory brought out by e-flux Journal in 2022 she contributed an essay ‘Contingent Contagion’, which argued that the way we look at images and visualise pandemics today is contingent on longer histories of seeing, of colonialism and racial capitalism. Her essay ‘Political Plants: Art, Design, and Plant Sentience’ was published in Cultural Politic in a special issue on multispecies justice in 2023.

Sria gave lectures and talks in Zurich, Sydney (which she did online) and across the UK. Highlights included talks entitled ‘Soil, Air & Ecological Stewardship’ at Goldsmiths, University of London, and ‘The Origins of Vital Soil: Nationalism and Art in Early Twentieth-Century India’ at the Imagining Lost Origins conference at King’s College London. At the Centre, Chatterjee gave a short talk at a workshop on Hew Locke’s The Procession, which is currently being adapted for a film project initiated by Mark Hallett and Hew Locke. She was invited to serve on the panel of judges for the PEN HessellTiltman Prize awarded by English PEN for a non-fiction book of specifically historical content, and continued to serve as Editorial Advisor for the journal British Art Studies and on the Steering Group of the British Art Network.

Martin Myrone

Head of Grants, Fellowships & Networks

Martin’s major research output during this period has been A Biographical Dictionary of Royal Academy Students, 1769–1830, volume 84 of the Walpole Society. Reflecting more than two decades of research on the Royal Academy and its early students, including archival work undertaken as a PMC Mid-Career Fellow in 2014–15, this new reference work includes biographies of the 1,800 students who attended the Academy Schools during their first sixty years. Covering a seminal period in the development of the British art world and a transformative moment in artists’ identities and aspirations, this publication shares the original biographical data which underpinned Martin’s earlier book, Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art-Educational Opportunity in Romantic Britain (PMC, 2020).

Martin remains active as a scholar of British art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He contributed the chapter ‘Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist’ to The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts (2022) and curated A Harpy and his Brothers: The Wildmans in Bedford Square & Newstead Abbey, a Drawing Room Display held at the Centre from May to September 2023. Focusing on the lawyer Thomas Wildman, one of the earliest inhabitants of no. 16 Bedford Square – the Centre’s home since 1996 – the display and the accompanying booklet explored the connections between the Wildmans and William Beckford, and the sources of their wealth in Jamaican slave plantations and the slave trade, as well as the links with Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. Martin continues to research the history of Bedford Square, and the social and aesthetic lives and afterlives of Georgian terraces.

Martin remained a Trustee of Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, through to its successful re-opening in November 2022 after a major redevelopment and extension, and became a member of the Executive Committee of the Walpole Society in November 2022.

Martin Postle

Senior Research Fellow

Martin continued in his four-year full-time post as Senior Research Fellow, focusing his research on a projected catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby, to be published by the Paul Mellon Centre. He also continued to teach, offering two courses on the Yale in London Programme: ‘Art and the Country House’ in the second summer session of 2022, and ‘Joseph Wright of Derby: Artist in the Age of Enlightenment’ in spring 2023. At the PMC, he convened the inaugural Art Trade Seminar in July 2022, and also convened the Autumn Public Lecture Course, ‘Georgian Provocations II’, in which he gave a lecture on the self-portraits of Joseph Wright.

Martin also served on the following committees and boards: International Advisory Board, British Art Journal; the Council of the Attingham Trust; Trustee of the Catalogue Raisonné of Works by Philip de László; Trustee of Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham; and executive committee member of the Walpole Society. He also continued to serve on the Acceptance in Lieu Panel, administered by Arts Council England, and to provide expert advice to the UK Government’s Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest.

Board of Governors

Governors

Susan Gibbons

Vice Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communication and Chief of Staff to the President, Yale University, and ex-officio Chief Executive of the Paul Mellon Centre

Stephen C. Murphy

Vice President for Finance & Chief Financial Officer, Yale University

Peter Salovey

President and Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology, Yale University

Scott Strobel

University Provost and Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, Yale University

Members

Timothy Barringer

Paul Mellon Professor History of Art, Yale University

Edward S. Cooke, Jr

Charles F Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Director of the Center of Study in American Decorative Arts and Material Culture; Professor of American Studies, Director of Undergraduate Studies for History of Art, Yale University

Pericles Lewis

Dean of Yale College and Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University

Courtney J. Martin

Paul Mellon Director of the Yale Center for British Art

Jules D. Prown

Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus Director of History of Art, Yale University

Keith Wrightson

Randolph W. Townsend, Jr. Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University

Advisory council

Jo Applin

Courtauld Institute of Art

Rachel Chatalbash

Yale Center for British Art

Tarnya Cooper

National Trust

Viccy Coltman

University of Edinburgh

Elena Crippa

Tate Britain

Caroline Dakers

Central Saint Martins

David Dibosa

Chelsea College of Arts

John Goodall

Country Life

Julian Luxford

University of St Andrews

Dorothy Price

Courtauld Institute of Art

Christine Riding

National Gallery

Mark Sealy

Autograph ABP

Nicholas Tromans

Independent Art Historian