Academic Activities

The Centre hosted a rich and diverse academic activities programme as it entered its fiftieth anniversary year. The 2019–20 programme featured scholars, curators, artists and students. It also adapted to the extraordinary conditions brought about by the global pandemic. A vital range of virtual event formats, including the participation of new and ever-more international audiences, now complements the Centre’s vibrant programme of in-person events.

The fiftieth anniversary has provided an opportunity to renew thinking about the critical and creative resources that British art, culture and heritage bring to urgent contemporary questions, and to attend to fundamental new developments in the field. The series of fiftieth anniversary lectures hosted at the Centre took stock of major developments in the study of British art, including a stimulating range of perspectives on the subject’s evolution over the past fifty years. Distinguished speakers from different areas of British art history described their own experiences of the field and discussed its wider development during recent decades.

Collaborations with a number of partner institutions were realised during the year. The conference William Blake and the Idea of the Artist was devised in partnership with Tate Britain to mark its exhibition of the artist’s work. With Kettle’s Yard, the Centre ran Radical Materialities: Linder and Companion Histories, an international conference that accompanied a major exhibition of works by Linder Sterling. The Centre also collaborated with the curators of British Art Show 9 to workshop and devise curatorial and public programme modes.

Questions of global ecology and social justice have engaged the attention of all those invested in the field of British art histories during the year and are shaping the academic activities programme. A first series of the Centre’s new podcast British Art Talks was released, featuring new research by a broad range of historians which in each case resonated with challenges faced under lockdown conditions. The podcast invites speakers to present and discuss their research via the form of an audio programme that is accessible to specialist and general audiences, both local and international.