British Art Studies

The Centre’s peer-reviewed and open-access journal was founded in 2015, and initially published three times per year. During the period covered by this report, the editorial team decided to publish four issues of British Art Studies per year starting in 2019.

The articles and features in Issue 9 (August 2018) were mainly drawn from a symposium held at the Centre, titled Alma-Tadema: Antiquity at Home and on Screen (20 October 2017). Issue 10 (November 2018) published papers from the conference Landscape Now (30 November–1 December 2017), which was held at the Centre as the third in a series of international events organised collaboratively with the YCBA and the Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Compared to the traditional model of publishing proceedings in print, the themed issue of BAS offered an expedient, and richly illustrated, format for capturing the conference’s insights on landscape imagery in British art history.

In March 2019, Issue 11 was released with the title Theatres of War: Experimental Performance in London, 1914–1918 and Beyond. This themed issue was proposed by Dr Grace Brockington. The contents were thematically connected to a single artefact, an illustrated pacifist polemic by Vernon Lee titled The Ballet of the Nations (1915). As such, it was the first themed issue of BAS that was not derived from a conference. It presented Brockington’s research in the form of an online exhibition supported by a new BAS web template and incorporated a feature-length dance film, created by Brockington in collaboration with Impermanence Dance Theatre, which reinterprets The Ballet of the Nations for contemporary audiences. The journal part-funded the production of this film and hosts it permanently online. Issue 12 (May 2019) premiered another web template and feature, developed in response to a proposal from Professor Stephen Bann for a feature on his intellectual formation as a young art critic in the 1960s. Called “Animating the Archive,” it presents art, archival materials and texts in a non-linear format to articulate how encounters with people, places, events and publications can cumulatively transform thought. This issue also contained the first article funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art through our Objects in Motion grant, a data-driven study of the transatlantic nineteenth-century art trade by Barbara Pezzini and Alan Crookham.