Global Art

The department is committed to developing a more global history of art, moving beyond traditional Eurocentric canons and methodologies. In 2025-26 the department appointed four new specialists whose expertise expand and diversify our research and teaching: Dr Peyvand Firouzeh as Assistant Professor of Islamic art, focusing on medieval and early modern Iran and India; Dr Iheanyi Onwuegbucha as Assistant Professor of African and Caribbean Modern and Contemporary Art; Dr Henning von Mirbach as Assistant Professor of Early Modern Chinese Art; and Dr Matthew Walker as Assistant Professor of British Architecture. These appointments underpin the Department’s new MPhil in the Global History of Art and Architecture, which welcomes its first cohort in 2026-27.

To lay the foundations for this new programme, and with support from the University’s Global Humanities initiative, in 2021-22 we hosted leading specialists in African, Asian, and Islamic art as Visiting Professors in the Department. Additionally, Cambridge Visual Culture (CVC) has a key role in taking our global agenda forwards. Recent events organized and supported by CVC include research seminars on African Americans in Soviet Art and Chicana art in the United States, together with a major conference on post-colonial approaches to Latin American art. CVC identifies synergies and knits together initiatives across departments, museums and colleges, for example the exhibition on the Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander at Jesus College and associated symposium.

In its drive towards a more global art history, the Department has encouraged applications to major funding bodies by early career scholars. In recent years we have welcomed Leverhulme Early Career Fellows working on late Ottoman visual and material culture, contemporary Latin American art, and cultural exchange between Early Modern Iberia and Africa. Our research-led teaching has led to a significant renewal and expansion of our curriculum, encompassing both our first-year core teaching and advanced options in the global Middle Ages, Chinese art from the Bronze Age to Mao, medieval and early modern Islamic art, modern and contemporary African and Caribbean art, post-war conceptual and protest art in Latin America, and global Modernisms. We are also extending our horizons through our multiple research seminars, which increasingly have a global scope (for example, On the Move – Artists, Ideas, Objects, convened by our graduate students). The Kunst graduate seminar on the German foundations of global art history, hosted by the Department and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, has attracted a large audience from across the world. Our annual Slade lectures provide further opportunities to bring eminent scholars to Cambridge from underrepresented fields in the University, with recent series on art and anthropology, Mesoamerican visual culture, and Indian art of the Early Modern period.