History of Art

We would like to welcome the following three new members of staff in our department: Dr Stephanie Schwartz, Dr Richard Taws and Dr Sarah James.  Following is a brief description of their accomplishments to date.

Dr Stephanie Schwartz, who joined the department this fall, teaches 19th and 20th-century American visual culture. Her principal area of research is documentary photography and she is currently completing a book on Walker Evans’s 1933 Cuba portfolio. The book examines the relationship between the development of photographic modernism in the United States and the politics of Cuba’s Americanization. She is also developing a new project on contemporary Cuban photography. This project investigates the resurgence of documentary practices in Cuba following the political and social upheavals of the 1990s.

Dr Richard Taws, who will be joining the department this January 2011, teaches 18th and 19th-century visual culture. Much of his work has focused on printed images and the technologies that produce and sustain them, particularly during the period of the French Revolution. Aspects of this work have been published in journals including The Art Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, Sculpture Journal and RES, among other places. Richard is completing a book that examines how ephemeral images and objects made in 1790s France mediated diverse political positions and provided new ways of negotiating the memory of the Revolution. He is also currently working on a new project about the relationship between print culture and telegraphy in the 19th-century Atlantic world.

Dr Sarah James, who will be joining the department in September 2011, has been awarded an Early Career Fellowship by the AHRC for this academic year to complete her book on East and West German photography. The book examines both well-known and previously neglected photographers, from the 1950s up until the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first major account of photography across a divided Germany, the book will explore the self-reflexive realisms of a series of documentary photography projects in light of their reception and critical reappraisal of previous modernist photographic paradigms, in relation to the changing politics of subjectivity, and the social, political and cultural context of the Cold War.