Powerful Ideas: New Research in Art History at the University of Sydney

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A program supporting new ideas and research within the University of Sydney's discipline of art history.

The entrance to the RC Mills building at the University of Sydney, home to the Power Institute and the discipline of art history.

In 1965, the University of Sydney used a bequest from the artist J.W. Power to establish not only the Power Institute, but a new Department of Art History. Over the years, the discipline has been at the forefront of teaching and research in art history and visual culture.  

Today, the Power Institute's ties to the discipline remain strong: we share resources (such as the Schaeffer Library), expertise (such as in the Sydney Asian Art Series), and premises at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus. The Power Institute's Director is also the discipline's Power Professor of Art History. 

This program both supports and highlights the incredible work being done by researchers within the discipline, principally through the "Art History Seminar Series" and the "Power Institute Reading Group".

 

Art History Seminar Series

The Art History Research Seminars is a forum for the sharing of new ideas and research in art and visual culture. It is held at the University of Sydney.

The seminars generally take place on Thursdays, 3:00 - 4:30pm (during semester times). Seminars are free and open to all. Registration is not required. 

 

Power Institute Reading Group

A monthly reading group to discuss new books in art and visual culture. Open to all!

 

Events

Upcoming

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David Corbet

Turning Sorrow into Meaning

27 March 2025, 3:00PM
Schaeffer Seminar Room, RC Mills Building and via Zoom

A seminar on themes arising from Dr Corbet's new book, Trauma, Art and Memory in the Postcolony.

People

A photograph of David Corbet
David Corbet

David Corbet is a writer, researcher and educator based in Sydney. He is an alumnus of Central St Martin’s, University of the Arts, London (UAL) (Postgrad Diploma); UNSW (MFA); and the University of Sydney (PhD). He has taught into history, theory, curatorial and studio courses at Australian universities over several years. He is the founder of a long-established design and art consultancy with diverse clients across many sectors, and he has creatively led many projects as a curator, editor, and designer, writing numerous articles and book chapters about contemporary visual cultures, and editing and designing several books and exhibition catalogues. His personal visual practice encompasses graphic and spatial design; drawing, printmaking, painting and photomedia; installation and environmental projects. 

This new book emerges from several years of postdoctoral research into memorial and counter-memorial practices occurring in the contemporary visual arts worldwide, across diverse postcolonial topologies and imaginaries. Commissioned in the UK under the aegis of Switzerland-based global publishing giant Springer Nature, it is envisaged as a wide-ranging ‘reader’ which will be relevant to students, researchers and subject experts across the fields of visual arts, architecture and urban planning; cultural and memory studies; trauma and affect studies; curatorial and museum studies. 

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Jaye Early

The self-design of contemporary confessional video art

10 April 2025, 3:00PM
Schaeffer Seminar Room, RC Mills Building and via Zoom

Art historian and artist Dr Jaye Early addresses themes arising from his new book, Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity: Private Experiences in Public Spaces (2025).

People

A photograph of Jaye Early.
Jaye Early

Dr Jaye Early’s recent book publication, Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity: Private Experiences in Public Spaces, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2025. This book is a monograph of his practise-led PhD that was completed at the Victorian College of the arts, the University of Melbourne in 2018. Early’s painting and video-based performance work appear in several private and public collections including, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Victorian University. Early has exhibited both nationally and internationally since 2015. Additionally, Early’s painting work have been included in several prestigious national art awards, including: the Archibald prize, John Sulman Prize, the Leicester prize, Moran National Portrait Prize, Victorian Indigenous Art Awards, Redlands Art Award, Darebin Art award, Koorie Art Prize, Bayside Acquisitive Prize, and the Waverley Art Prize. 

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Anthony Gardner

Art in an Age of Perpetual Distraction

8 May 2025, 3:00PM
Schaeffer Seminar Room, RC Mills Building and via Zoom

Professor Anthony Gardner presents on the dynamics of distraction that define both contemporary capitalism and its art. 

People

A photograph of Anthony Gardner
Anthony Gardner

Anthony Gardner is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Oxford and the Sir William Dobell Visiting Chair in Art History at the Australian National University. He has published widely on subjects including postcolonialism, postsocialism and curatorial histories, with articles in On Curating, ARTMargins,Third Text, Postcolonial Studies and many other journals and anthologies. From 2012 to 2021, he was an editor of the MIT Press journal ARTMargins, for which he continues to serve as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board. Among his books are Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (Melbourne, 2013), Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015) and, also through MIT Press in 2015, the anthology Neue Slowenische Kunst: From Kapital to Capital (with Zdenka Badovinac and Eda Čufer), which was a finalist for the 2017 Alfred H Barr Award for best exhibition catalogue worldwide. In 2016, he co-authored (with Charles Green, University of Melbourne) Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art, published by Wiley-Blackwell. 

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Tara McDowell

Simone Leigh's Maternal Sentinels

15 May 2025, 3:00PM
Schaeffer Seminar Room, RC Mills Building and via Zoom

A presentation on the practices of mothering in the work of American artist Simone Leigh.

People

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Tara McDowell

Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include contemporary curating, exhibition histories, art institutions, feminist and queer spaces of sociability and production, and the various support structures of art, including home, school, exhibition, labour, and friendship. Her books include The Artist As (Sternberg Press, 2018) and The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess (The MIT Press, 2019). McDowell currently leads the Australia Research Council project Care and Repair: Rethinking Contemporary Curation for Conditions of Crisis. Her presentation on Simone Leigh is drawn from her current book project, The Mother Artist, which was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a Henry Moore Foundation Research Grant (both in 2023). 

Past

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Peyvand Firouzeh

Distance and Metaphor: Reimagining the Ka‘ba in Deccan India

15 September 2023, 2:00PM
Schaeffer Library Seminar Room, 210 RC Mills Building, University of Sydney Camperdown
This event has ended.

A presentation about the replication and circulation of the Ka'ba between the Islamic centre and peripheries.

People

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Peyvand Firouzeh

Dr Peyvand Firouzeh is Lecturer in Islamic Art at the University of Sydney, and a DECRA ARC Fellow (2023-2026). She is a trained architect and art historian specializing in medieval and early modern art and architecture from the Islamic world, with research interests in arts of Sufism, the interaction of image, space, and text, the mobility of artistic and intellectual networks within and beyond Persianate societies, and material histories of the Indian Ocean world.

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Toni Ross

Wellness Business–healing or stalking? Pilvi Takala’s The Stroker, 2018

5 October 2023, 2:00PM
Schaeffer Library Seminar Room, 210 RC Mills Building, University of Sydney Camperdown
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A seminar on Finnish performance artist Pilvi Takala, and the current cultural and corporate obsession with wellness.

People

A closely cropped photograph of a woman smiling at the camera
Toni Ross

Dr. Toni Ross taught art history and theory at UNSW, Sydney, School of Art & Design from 2001-2020 and is currently Honorary Senior lecturer at that institution. Her studies of contemporary art, aesthetics and politics have been published by Duke University Press, Routledge, Acumen Publishing, Intellect Books, Pennsylvania State University Press, among others. She has been Sydney reviewer for Artforum magazine since 2014. Her current research focusses on contemporary art engaged with wellness culture and ecological themes.

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Jane Garling

The Early Earle

2 November 2023, 2:00PM
Schaeffer Library Seminar Room, 210 RC Mills Building, University of Sydney Camperdown
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A seminar about the little known early work of English artist August Earle (1793-1838)

People

Jane Garling

Jane Garling is currently undertaking research into the life and work of Augustus Earle as part of a Doctor of Philosophy under the supervision of Dr Anita Callaway. She was drawn to this artist during her research into the life and work of Frederick Garling, a student of Earle in Sydney in the 1820s.

A watercolour painting showing a scene in Algeria, with a man on a horse in the foreground, and a group of men in the background sitting against the wall.
Roger Benjamin

Lionel Lindsay's Maghreb: the anti-modernist as Orientalist

22 February 2024, 2:00PM
Schaeffer Library Seminar Room, 210 RC Mills Building, University of Sydney Camperdown
This event has ended.

A seminar on the unfamiliar work of Australian artist Sir Lionel Lindsay.

People

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Roger Benjamin

Roger Benjamin (Professor of Art History, U of Sydney) has written and lectured on Matisse throughout his career, beginning with his Bryn Mawr PhD (Matisse’s ‘Notes of a Painter’: Criticism, Theory and Context, Ann Arbor 1987).  He co-curated QAG’s touring retrospective Matisse of 1995 before turning to questions of European Orientalism. His most recent publication on the Frenchman was “Matisse at the Senya el Hashti” in The Art Bulletin for 2019.

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Reading Group: Visions

31 July 2024, 4:00PM
Schaeffer Seminar Room, RC Mills Building
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The Power Institute's regular reading group, focusing on new ideas and research in art history and visual culture.

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Power Reading Group: Afro Asia

29 August 2024, 1:00PM
Schaeffer Seminar Room
This event has ended.

The Power Institute's regular reading group, focusing on new ideas and research in art history and visual culture.

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Donna West Brett

Modernist Photobooks, Propaganda & the Everyday

29 August 2024, 3:00PM
Schaeffer Library Seminar Room, 210 RC Mills Building, University of Sydney Camperdown
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A presentation by Donna West Brett on art, politics and modernist aesthetics

People

A profile photograph of Donna West Brett.
Donna West Brett

Donna West Brett is Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at The University of Sydney. She is author of Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge, 2016); co-editor with Natalya Lusty, Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2019), and with Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2024). She is Research Leader for Photographic Cultures at Sydney, Editorial Member for the Visual Culture and German Contexts Series, Bloomsbury, and Sloan Fellow in Photography at the Bodleian Libraries, 2024.

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Robert Brennan

Thresholds of Art in Renaissance Italy

5 September 2024, 3:00PM
Schaeffer Library Seminar Room, 210 RC Mills Building, University of Sydney Camperdown
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Renaissance scholar Robert Brennan discusses the circulation of the ideas about "art" between Italy, Africa and the Middle East.

People

A profile picture of Robert Brennan.
Robert Brennan

Robert Brennan received a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 2016, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut) and the University of Sydney. Since 2022 he has taught as Lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy (Harvey Miller, 2019), as well as articles in Art BulletinOxford Art Journal, and Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics.

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Rhiannon Paget

Divine Felines: The Cat in Japanese Art

12 September 2024, 1:30PM
Schaeffer Seminar Room, RC Mills Building, University of Sydney
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A seminar celebrating the launch of a new book by University of Sydney graduate Rhiannon Paget.

People

Rhiannon Paget

Rhiannon Paget is the Curator of Asian Art at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Florida State University. She has published research on paintings, textiles, popular visual culture, and especially woodblock prints. Her most recent books are Divine Felines: The Cat in Japanese Art (2023), Japanese Prints in Transition: From the Floating World to the Modern World (2023), and Saitō Kiyoshi: Graphic Awakening (2021). Co-authored titles include Hiroshige: Nature and the City (2023) and Hiroshige & Eisen: The Sixty-Nine Stations along the Kisokaidō (2017, winner of the 2018 IFPDA Book Award). She has curated numerous exhibitions, including Mountains of the Mind: Scholars’ Rocks in China and Beyond (2023–24), and Saitō Kiyoshi: Graphic Awakening (2021). Prior to joining The Ringling, she was the A. W. Mellon Fellow for Japanese Art, where she curated the exhibition A Century of Japanese Prints (2017) and co-curated Conflicts of Interest: Art and War in Modern Japan (2016–17). She holds a PhD from the University of Sydney, Australia.

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India Urwin
Robert Miller

Missionary Position / Looking Forward to the Past

12 September 2024, 3:00PM
Schaeffer Library Seminar Room, 210 RC Mills Building, University of Sydney Camperdown
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Two presentations of new research on Yuki Kihara's stunning 2020 work Paradise Camp, and the little known collection of art at Australia's Parliament House. 

People

India Urwin

India Urwin (she/her) is a decolonial art historian, curator and arts writer living and working on Gadigal land. India holds a BA with First Class Honours in Art History and Film Studies and a Master of Art Curating from the University of Sydney. India was the Assistant Curator of the Head On Photo Festival, and Assistant Editor of Interactional Magazine, an online photography magazine. Currently, India is undertaking a PhD under the supervision of Associate Professor Donna Brett. Her thesis, Unsettling: Contemporary post-colonial art and the promise of decolonisation, seeks to refocus the conversation of institutional decolonisation on art itself.

Robert Miller

Robert Miller only came to the study of art history after careers as an electrical engineer and a patent attorney. As an art enthusiast and modest collector, upon retiring Robert enrolled in the Diploma of Arts course to give life to that interest. This diverse, rigorous coursework, and especially the fieldwork in Paris, led to him undertaking a research master’s project jointly supervised by Prof Roger Benjamin and Dr Stephen Gilchrist. His subsequent doctorate, supervised by Prof Mark Ledbury, was conferred earlier this year. 

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Aiden Magro

Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: The Private and Public Lives of the John Jenner Albums

26 September 2024, 3:00PM
Schaeffer Seminar Room, RC Mills Building and via Zoom
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A presentation on the albums of photojournalist John Jenner, and their documentation of queer life in Warrane (Sydney).

People

A profile photograph of Aiden Magro
Aiden Magro

Aiden Magro is a researcher, writer and casual academic living and working on unceded, stolen Gadigal land. He received his Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours) in 2020 and was awarded the University Medal for his honours thesis “Exposing the State: Loo Zihan’s queer performance.” His current research interests include photography, queer art, and archives. Aiden is currently a PhD Candidate in the Art History department at University of Sydney.

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Power Reading Group: Apples

3 October 2024, 1:00PM
Schaeffer Library Seminar Room, 210 RC Mills Building, University of Sydney Camperdown
This event has ended.

The Power Institute's regular reading group, focusing on new ideas and research in art history and visual culture.

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Drisana Misra

Transoceanic Currents and Pelagic Materiality during Japan’s Nanban Period

17 October 2024, 3:00PM
Schaeffer Library Seminar Room, 210 RC Mills Building, University of Sydney Camperdown
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A presentation on a group of 17th and 18th century objects produced and shaped by the waters between the Philippines, Taiwan, Ryūkyū, and Japan.

People

Drisana Misra

Drisana Misra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. She studies the material and intellectual exchanges between the Japanese archipelago, the Americas, and the Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She received her PhD from Yale University in 2023, where her thesis won the Marston Anderson Prize in East Asian Studies. She is currently working on her first monograph, based on the dissertation, entitled Japanese New Worlds: Japanese New Worlds: Intersecting Imaginaries of the Nanban Period (c. 1543–1641).

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Yvonne Low

Haunting History: The art and (life-) writings of Mia Bustam and Katharine Sim

24 October 2024, 3:00PM
Schaeffer Seminar Room, RC Mills Building and via Zoom
This event has ended.

A presentation on the feminist model of life writing in the writings of painters Mia Bustam and Katharine Sim, and the art histories of Indonesia and Malaya.

People

A profile picture of Yvonne Low.
Yvonne Low

Yvonne Low is an art historian in Asian Art. She is a lecturer at the University of Sydney, teaching Art History and Curating in the Undergraduate and Postgraduate programs. She researches on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, with an interest in Chinese diasporic cultures, women’s history, and digital methods. As editorial committee to Southeast of Now Journal (NUS Press), Yvonne is committed to advancing scholarship in the region. She is currently an advisory committee member for The Flow of History (AWARE/Asia Art Archive), The Womanifesto Way Digital Anthology (Power Institute, DFAT, 4A) and co-developer of digital tool, Artists Trajectories Map.

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Power Reading Group: Future History

7 November 2024, 1:00PM
Schaeffer Seminar Room, RC Mills Building, University of Sydney
This event has ended.

The Power Institute's regular reading group, focusing on new ideas and research in art history and visual culture.