News

We would like to congratulate our undergraduates, postgraduates and staff for all of their efforts and achievements during this academic year, and look forward to seeing the future accomplishments of our graduates and returning students!

The Department is delighted to announce that it has been ranked first in the UK in the Complete University Guide 2025. This outstanding recognition reflects the department’s continued commitment to academic excellence, world-leading research, and exceptional student experience.We are equally proud to share that the University as a whole has also be…

We are delighted to announce that next year’s conference will be held in collaboration with this department.The Annual Conference attracts around 400 attendees each year and is popular with academics, curators, practitioners, PhD students, early career researchers and anyone engaged with art history research. Members of the Association get reduced …

The scholarship provides funding over a 12-month period to those engaged in the study of French 18th-century fine and decorative art to enable them to develop new ideas and research that will contribute to this field of art historical study. 

The Athena Swan award is a national framework used in higher education and research to promote gender equality and advance the careers of women in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine) and other fields. It recognises institutions and departments that demonstrate a commitment to creating a more inclusive and supportive …

The 170th Men's Race will take place on Sunday 13th of April March from 2:21pm between Putney and Mortlake.For more information and details on how to watch: https://www.theboatrace.org/spectator-information

Dr Laura Slater, Associate Professor in the History of Medieval Art and Architecture, will be speaking at the Séminaire franco-britannique d'histoire/Seminar in Franco-British History in Paris (Maison de la Recherche de l’université Paris IV-Sorbonne) on Thursday 3rd April on: ‘Philippa of Hainault: Queenship, Music and Manuscripts’. Further detail…

Dr Salmon and two other colleagues will be discussing the life and work of the English architect John Soane (1753-1837), who rose from being a bricklayer's son to become the architect of the Bank of England and of King George IV's entry spaces to the House of Lords.  For this, among other public works, Soane received a knighthood, dying at the head…

How did people living in the Middle Ages respond to spectacular buildings, such as the Gothic cathedrals? While contemporary scholarship places a large emphasis on the emotional content of Western medieval figurative art, the emotion of architecture has largely gone undiscussed. In a radical new approach, Architecture and Affect in the Middle Ages …

The Department is pleased to announced that the following persons have been elected by the ad hoc Board of Electors to the Slade Professorship of Fine Art:2025–26Professor Terence Smith, University of Pittsburgh2026–27Professor Eyal Weizman, Goldsmiths, University of London2027–28Professor Tamar Garb, University College London2028–29Professor Steph…

Focused on Surrealists Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning, in dialogue with contemporary painters Sara Anstis, Piper Bangs and Ginny Casey, the exhibition celebrates the subversive potential of ‘distraction’ for women artists.https://www.raphaeldurazzo.com/exhibitions/19-le-surrealisme-au-service-de-la-distraction/overview/

The occasion was celebrated yesterday on October 23 with a drinks reception at Scroope Terrace. We wish the new team every success with Issue 4 and look forward to toasting their achievements again in the new year!https://www.linkedin.com/company/cambridge-journal-of-visual-culture/

The Bill Brown Creative Workshops (BBCW) is a new platform for creative thinking and interdisciplinary solution-building at Churchill College.The BBCW provides multi-purpose workshops where students, as well as Fellows and staff, can explore, design, test, scale, and build, and realise their ideas. The spaces are equipped with extensive resources a…

Dr Nelson presented his work at the first Modern and Contemporary Art (MACA) Seminar series event of the new academic year.To find out more about the book visit: https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300272307/never-ending/To find out more about the seminar series, visit: https://www.hoart.cam.ac.uk/seminars/cambridge-modern-and-contemporary-art-seminar…

From the satirical barbs of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1511) to the urbane games of Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (1528), wit was a serious subject in the Renaissance, addressed in natural philosophy and medicine as the intellective part of the human soul, in artistic theory as the wellspring of creativity, and in criticism as one of the…