Henning comes to Cambridge from the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei where he taught courses on Chinese art history. Prior to that, he held positions at The Courtauld in London, and at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a historian of early modern Chinese art, with a particular focus on landscape painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His current book project, Maternal Landscapes: Women and the Politics of Commemoration in Early Modern Chinese Art, challenges conventional boundaries between court and literati art. It explores regionally diverse practices that shaped artistic engagements with landscape in the 17th and 18th centuries, centring the roles of mothers and grandmothers as key figures in artistic production, commemorative practice, and the formation of spatial memory.
Henning writes: “I am excited and honoured to be joining the Department of History of Art at Cambridge and cannot wait to meet the students and colleagues who make this such a vibrant place for the study of art. I look forward to sharing perspectives on the arts of early modern China and their global entanglements in my teaching, and to working with my colleagues to broaden the department’s horizons and approach art history from a more global perspective.”