British Art Studies

During the period covered by this report, three issues of British Art Studies –the Centre’s peer-reviewed and open access journal – were published online. The journal was founded in 2015 and is co-published with the Yale Center for British Art.

Issue 17 (September 2020) was a themed issue on Elizabethan and Jacobean miniature painting, guest edited by Catharine MacLeod and Alexander Marr. It contains nine articles, written by art historians, curators and conservators, which were all drawn from a 2019 conference on Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, hosted by the National Portrait Gallery and co-organised by the Paul Mellon Centre and the University of Cambridge. The journal’s digital platform allowed the integration of zoomable high-resolution images of several miniatures and enabled us to present images from technical analysis using a slider tool for close comparison.

The next two issues were both open issues. Issue 18 (November 2020) features articles on a range of subjects, and a ‘Conversation Piece’ feature, convened by BAS contributing editor Sria Chatterjee, brought together short texts from twenty authors responding to her provocation on British art history, environmental justice and the ecological crisis. Independent curator Angela Chan also commissioned five artists and collectives to contribute cover art for this issue, selecting pieces thematically connected to the arts and environmental justice. For Issue 19 (February 2021), we commissioned another ‘Conversation Piece’ feature on a timely subject in British art history: the provocation was ‘Necrography: Death-Writing in the Colonial Museum’ by Dan Hicks. Both of these features were among our most read within months of being published. Alongside the articles in Issue 19, Nigerian artist Victor Ehikhamenor contributed cover art from a series of works examining Portuguese and British colonial legacies in the Benin Empire.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a redesign of the journal, which had originally been planned for this business year, was rescheduled for 2022. This will, among other things, implement improvements identified by the user-experience testing carried out on the journal’s website in February 2020.