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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, and Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics.

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.

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 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. 

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.

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).

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.

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. 

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.