Jeffrey Collins completed a chapter on visual representations of furniture during the Age of Exploration (1500-1700) for volume 3 of Bloomsbury Publishing’s 6-volume Cultural History of Furniture (for other faculty contributions to this project, see Krohn and Simpson, below). He is currently at work on an article on furniture in the public sphere for volume 4, A Cultural History of Furniture in The Age of Enlightenment (AD 1700-1800).

Over the summer, Ivan Gaskell resumed his senior fellowship (two months for five successive years through 2018) at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg (Advanced Study Institute in Humanities and Social Sciences), Georg-August University, Göttingen. He was appointed to the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg and attended its annual meeting in Göttingen. Gaskell gave papers at the following symposia and workshops in June and July: International University Museum Strategic Development and Exchange Workshop, University of Glasgow; “Thinking with Objects: University Museum Collections in Teaching and Research,” University of Oxford; “The Museum as Method: Collaborative Research Network,” University of Cambridge; and “Curatopia: Histories, Theories, Practices,” Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich. Gaskell published a chapter entitled “The Life of Things” in The International Handbook of Museum Studies: Museum Media, ed. Michelle Henning (Oxford: Wiley), pp. 167-190. He published two reviews, one of the book, The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, ed. Jean-Paul Martinon, in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73 (2015), pp. 208-210; the other of an exhibition, Brandbilder: Kunstwerke als Zeugen des Zweiten Weltkriegs, Niedersächsischen Landesmuseum Hannover, in West 86th online, July 2015.

Deborah Krohn is preparing a chapter on verbal representations of furniture in the Age of Exploration, for Bloomsbury Publishing.

François Louis presented a paper, “Gold and Jewelry in Song-Era China: A Comparative View,” at a symposium of the Asia Society: “Encounters with Early Asian Gold,” October 3.

In July, at the University of Brighton, Michele Majer presented a paper, “The Representation of Fashion and Art in French Fashion Periodicals, 1900-1920,” at the conference, “Textual Fashion: The Representation of Fashion and Clothing in Word and Image.”

Andrew Morrall gave the keynote presentation, “The Power of Nature and the Agency of Art,” at the international conference on “The Agency of Things: New Perspectives on European Art of the Fourteenth-Sixteenth Centuries,” hosted by the University of Warsaw in conjunction with the National Gallery, Warsaw, June 11-12. He spoke at the workshop “From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia,” organized by the Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies (CREMS), Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, University of Birmingham, July 2-3, and he gave the plenary talk entitled “To ‘tapisse sure the chambres of thi minde and remembraunce’: The Uses of Biblical Decoration in the Early Modern Protestant Home,” at the conference, “Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World,” Cambridge University, July 9 -11. His article on “Domestic Decoration and the Bible in the Early Modern Home,” in The Oxford Handbook to the Bible in England, c. 1520-1700, ed. Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith and Rachel Willie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), was published on August 27.

Shawn Rowlands presented a paper in Vienna on September 10 at the Eleventh Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies. Co-authored with Catriona Fisk, it was entitled, “‘A Dearly Bought Amusement’: Race, Law, and the Overland Telegraph Route in Colonial Australia.”

Elizabeth Simpson worked with several colleagues over the summer on the preparation of articles for the forthcoming A Cultural History of Furniture, volume 1, entitled A Cultural History of Furniture in Antiquity (2500 BCE - 500 CE), to be published by Bloomsbury Publishing, London. The six-volume series covers the history of furniture in its cultural setting from antiquity through the present.

Stephanie Su presented a paper, “History Painting in East Asia: Reflections on a Global Art History,” on September 9 in Paris at the 5th Congress of Asian and the Pacific Studies, organized by the French Research Consortium for Asian Studies and the French National Center for Scientific Research. On September 10, she presented a paper, “Body Without Boundaries: Male Nude and the Historiography of Modern Japanese Art” at the annual conference of the British Association of Japanese Studies held at SOAS, University of London.

Catherine Whalen was the Barnet Foundation Visiting Scholar at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, October 16-17. She presented two lectures, “Eve Peri: Art, Craft and Design,” and “The Maker’s Voice: What Artists, Craftspeople, and Designers Say About What They Do, and Why It Matters.” At the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting on April 9, 2016, she will lead the session “The Material Culture of Leadership: A Workshop with Objects, Images, and Texts” and co-moderate “When Stuff Matters: How Objects of Controversy Can Spark a Civic Engagement.”