History of Art (PhD / MPhil) - 2012/2013 entry

The Department of History of Art and Screen Media has an international reputation for teaching and research in medieval, Renaissance and modern art history. Our range of interests extends into new areas of study, such as the application of computers to art history, nineteenth- and twentieth-century design history, museology, issues relating to gender and representation, and interdisciplinary topics, particularly relationships between art and music; art and film; and art and anthropology.

Current research areas include: medieval architecture; Italian late medieval and Renaissance art and patronage; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art; the colonial encounter and cultural history in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; museology; nationalism and ethnicity in contemporary visual culture; visual culture in South Africa; nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture and design in France and England; aspects of gender and visual culture; art and design in fin-de-siècle Vienna; art and music; computer applications for art history; and digital media and critical theory.

Find out more about this programme in our departmental handbook.

You will have access to outstanding technical research support and facilities. The Centre for Film and Visual Media Research opened in 2007 in the College's buildings in Gordon Square. It has a 75-seat auditorium with full digital projection and 16mm and 35mm facilities, plus a viewing room with PCs for editing and converting materials from analogue formats and five viewing stations for VHS and DVD. The department also has an excellent historic slide library and is developing digital systems for its slide and film collections. A range of advanced technical resources is also available in theVasari multimedia research laboratory.

Birkbeck's location in Bloomsbury offers excellent access to specialist libraries in the University of London, including the University of London Library, the Institute for Historical Research, the Warburg Institute, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the major national resource of the British Library. You will also have easy access to specialist art libraries not far from Birkbeck, including the library of the Courtauld Institute of Art, the British Architectural Library and the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). The great visual resources of the British Museum, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Gallery and the V&A, commercial galleries and salesrooms, and temporary exhibition galleries like the Barbican Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Hayward Gallery and the Royal Academy also make London a particularly good place in which to undertake research.

The department has a lively postgraduate culture, and students meet regularly to participate in reading groups, writing groups and special research skills seminars. There is an annual research forum, where professionals in related fields share their expertise. We also run a postgraduate seminar series, where internationally renowned scholars present current research.

Find out more about our world-class research resources, as well as our specialist resources.

To ensure that we have an appropriate supervisor for your area of research, you should contact the course team to discuss it before submitting your application.

For information about applying as a research student, read our Guide for Applicants.

• Suzannah Biernoff, MA, PhD: History of the body, vision and emotion; relationships between war, modernity and visual culture.
• Dorigen Caldwell, MA, PhD: Sixteenth-century Italian art and culture; symbolism; art and patronage.
• Professor Annie Coombes, BA, PhD, FRAI: Ethnography, anthropology and cultural history in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; museum culture; nationalism and visual culture in the modern period.
• Patrizia Di Bello, MA, PhD: History of photography; nineteenth-century art and visual culture; aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women's art; feminist and psychoanalytical art criticism.
• Tag Gronberg, BA, MA, PhD: Nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, architecture and design in Europe; aspects of gender and visual culture in the modern period.
• Laura Jacobus, BA, BA, PhD: Aspects of Italian art c.1250–1450; spectator experience and authorial intention.
• Dominic Janes, MA, PhD: Later Roman and medieval art history; medievalism and visual culture.
• Gabriel Koureas, MA, PhD: Modern and contemporary visual culture; issues of modernity, memory, gender, sexuality and national identity in visual and material culture; representations of war.
• Robert Maniura, BA, PhD: European Renaissance art and pilgrimage.
• Professor L Nead, BA, PhD: Nineteenth-century British art; aspects of gender and visual representation in the modern period; art and the city; art and film.
• Zoe Opacic, MA, PhD: Medieval art and architecture; relationship between architecture, public ritual and urban planning.
• Kate Retford, MA, PhD: Eighteenth-century British art and culture; use of visual evidence in history; portraiture, gender and the country house.
• Simon Shaw-Miller, BA, PhD: Interrelationships in audio and visual culture, especially art history and musicology; modern aesthetic theories; history of art from late eighteenth century to present.
• Leslie Topp, BA, MA, PhD: Central European architectural and design history and urbanism, 1890–1914; Vienna c.1900; architecture and science.

• Canadian surrealism
• Imperial Exhibitions 1922–1936
• Sixteenth-century Venetian art
• The space of imagination: reading in French painting 1850–1900
• Selling England by the Pound: The Hepworth Manufacturing Company
• Aesthetics and film
• Gender and race in late nineteenth-century British art
• Landscape 1918–1928
• Modernism à la mode: women, movies and modern style
• The historical documentary in post-war British television
• Photographic collections compiled by women
• Experiments in black and white: OP Art, Bridget Riley and Britain in the 1960s
• Richard Dadd: The art of the insane
• History of art in an electronic environment
• Bereavement, Identity and Monuments
• The role of media for immigration in post-war Britain (1945–1980)
• Popularising High Culture
• Art and law.

• You can apply throughout the year for registration at the beginning of term (October or January).