Academic Activities

The Centre’s Academic Activities programme responded rapidly and creatively to the challenges of organising and hosting events during a global pandemic. Under the leadership of Anna Reid (Head of Research, parental leave cover in 2020) and Sarah Victoria Turner (Deputy Director for Research), a dynamic series of online talks, conferences, panels and podcasts was offered to an increasingly international audience. As well as presenting challenges, the production of an entirely digital events programme provided opportunities to experiment with the formats used for communicating new research and to think around developing new audiences for the research connected with the Centre. One of the first entirely digital events was Art Criticism and the Pandemic, a two-part panel discussion between art writers, historians and artists that attracted a large global audience.

The British Art and Natural Forces series of events took place across the autumn term, building on the experience of digital programming gained earlier in the year. This took the form of film screenings, panel discussions and keynote papers. The multi-part programme focused on the encounter between artistic or art-historical practice and the forces of the natural world, and placed such encounters in both contemporary and historical perspectives. The contributions to this programme highlighted the growing interest within British art studies in the overlaps between artistic, geophysical, biological and ecological bodies of knowledge.

With audiences unable to visit the Centre for much of 2020, podcasts offered another way for its research to reach beyond the physical walls of our building in Bedford Square. In March 2020, Sarah Victoria Turner released Sculpting Lives, a podcast written and co-hosted with Jo Baring (Director of The Ingram Collection) focusing on the careers of historic and contemporary women sculptors. Listened to by more than 17,000 users, the podcast format has proved to be a popular and exciting channel for distribution and communication. Anna Reid also developed two new series of the British Art Talks podcast, one of which featured contributions by artists Lucy Skaer, Ryan Gander and Elizabeth Price, and the other of which was titled Experiments in Art Writing