Tomás Harris Visiting Professorship

About the Lecture Series

The Tomás Harris lecture series is named after Tomás Harris due to his contributions to the art world as a dealer, artist and patron. Each year, UCL History of Art invites an emerging scholar who has already made a significant contribution to art history and visual cultures to give two public lectures and a seminar for our research students.

Past Lectures

It has been our honour to invite the following academics to give the Tomás Harris lectures in previous years:

• 2024: Jennifer Nelson (University of Delaware): "Art and the Other: The Ends of World Christendom"
• 2023: Sanjukta Sunderason (University of Amsterdam): "Art as Archives of Decolonial Liberation" and "Historical Consciousness and Decolonial Modernisms"
• 2022: Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton Univesity): "Geographies of Nineteenth Century Black Art"
• 2019: Cécile Fromont (Yale University): "Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola"
• 2018: Jeremy Melius (Tufts University): "Ruskin's Histories - Being together and Being Apart"
• 2017: David Young Kim (University of Pennsylvania): "Groundwork and the Renaissance Picture - How can we bring the ground into view?  and Gold Ground as the site of possibility"
• 2016: Charlotte Guichard (Institute d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, CNRS-École normale supérieure-Paris 1): Performing the Name: "Signatures, Authorship and Autographie in Eighteenth-Century French Painting" and "Revolutionary Signatures: Jacques-Louis David and the Politics of Authenticity"
• 2015: André Dombrowski (University of Philadelphia): "Temporalities of Impressionism I: Monet and the Wreckage of history" and "Temporalities of Impressionism II: Painting at the Speed of Consciousness"
• 2013: Rachel Haidu (University of Rochester): "How to Teach a Sculptor: Artur Żmijewski, Grzegorz Kowalski, Oskar Hansen, Katarzyna Kobro", and "'Black is a Color': Steve McQueen, James Coleman, Black Audio Film Collective" 
• 2012: John David Rhodes (University of Sussex): "Narrative Cinema and Domestic Architecture: The Spectacle of Property", and "Hollywood, City of Bungalows" 
• 2011: Hanneke Grootenboer (University of Oxford): "An Overlooked Episode of Vision's History: Eighteenth-Century Eye Portraits", and "Treasuring the Gaze: Portraiture's Intimate Vision" 
• 2010: Richard Taws (McGill University, Montreal): "Time, Media and the French Revolution"
• 2009: Claire Bishop (The Graduate Center, CUNY): "The Social Turn in Contemporary Art"
• 2007: Michael Cole (University of Pennsylvania): "Urbanism as Exorcism at the End of the Renaissance"
• 2006: David Joselit (Yale University): "Feedback: Art and Politics in the Television Era"