Director's Note

Mark Hallett, Director

A few months ago, on a chilly October evening, I was honoured to host an especially happy event: a tribute to Mark Girouard, one of our most distinguished architectural historians. This celebration, which followed soon after Mark’s 90th birthday, was also organised to coincide with our publication of his magnificent, long-awaited book, A Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture, 1540–1640. This volume, the product of decades of research, is packed with invaluable information and graced by the wit and lucidity for which Mark’s writings are so renowned. Those same qualities were much in evidence at our event, which took the form of an extended and informal conversation in which Mark responded to questions from a small gathering of his scholarly peers.

The event was a joyful one not only because it gave us the chance to discuss the career and work of a wonderful author, but because it took place in person in our library at Bedford Square. Across the past twenty months or so, we at the PMC have had to largely forgo this kind of in-person gathering, and turn instead to online programming to deliver our busy events schedule. As I hope those of you who have attended our recent events will agree, we have confidently explored and embraced the possibilities opened up by this accelerated move to online activity, and revelled in the opportunity to extend our reach as a research centre. Yet, alongside the many benefits we have enjoyed, there have been some costs too. At Mark’s celebration, the fact that we all encountered each other not on screen, but in person, gave the entire occasion a sense of communal warmth and interaction that I still feel is impossible to fully replicate on a virtual basis, however hard we might try.

At the PMC, we continue to think creatively about how best to combine the virtues of in-person and online research events. One obvious and promising way forward lies in organising in-person talks, workshops and conferences that are streamed live to a participating online audience. Another possibility – as was decided upon for the tribute to Mark – is to film the proceedings of our in-person events and release edited versions of these recordings at a later date. In the past, we have pursued variations on both these hybrid approaches, as the ‘Recordings’ page on our website attests. In future, we hope to further streamline our proceedings, to ensure that our lively and varied events programme successfully caters to audiences both at Bedford Square and across the globe.

In delivering such hybrid events, we will be benefiting from the ideas and expertise of our newly arrived Head of Research and Learning, Dr Sria Chatterjee. A brilliant and innovative scholar, Sria has recently been a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow at the Institute for Experimental Design and Media at the FHNW in Basel, and an Associate Scholar at the Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. She holds undergraduate degrees from Jadavpur and Oxford universities, and an MA and PhD from Princeton University. She is a prolific and wide-ranging writer and researcher, who founded the remarkable online project Visualizing the Virus. She has also recently played an important role at the PMC itself, as a much-valued contributing editor to our online journal, British Art Studies. We very much look forward to working with Sria at the Centre, as we continue to pursue our mission of supporting and generating the very best research on British art, architecture and visual culture.