Speaker
Dr Jessica Varsallona completed her PhD in Byzantine Studies in 2021 at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman, and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Birmingham. Previously, she received her BA, MA, and MRes in Art History at the University of Milan (Italy). Jessica has taught modules on Medieval and Byzantine Visual and Material Culture at the Universities of Milan, Salerno, Birmingham and the Courtauld Institute of Art (London). She is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.
Speaker and Course Director
Leah joined the department in 2021 and is an Associate Professor in the History of Art and a Fellow of Kellogg College as well as Director of Studies in History of Art. Previously, she worked at the Open University where her roles included Head of Research and Chair of the MA in Art History. She holds a BA from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver,) an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art (London) and a PhD from McGill University (Montreal).
Speaker
Dr Mehreen Chida-Razvi’s expertise is on the art, architecture, and material culture of Mughal South Asia and the wider Persianate world. Her research areas include the intersection of art, architecture, and politics; questions surrounding female patronage; and the physical and cultural spaces occupied by women. She is the Deputy Curator of the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art and the In-House Editor for their publication series, is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and regularly teaches courses and lectures on Islamic and Indo-Islamic art at SOAS, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the V&A Museum, and Oxford University’s Continuing Education Department.
Speaker
Sarah Thomas is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art department at Birkbeck, University of London. Her monograph Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition was published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in 2019. It examines the shifting iconography of slavery in British and European art between 1760 and 1840, and reconsiders how enslaved people were depicted within a historical context in which truth was deeply contested. She is currently working on a new book project, Slavery and the British Art Collector, 1768-1833.
Speaker
Sean is a Departmental Lecturer in the History of Art and Course Director for the Certificate, and Diploma in History of Art in the Department for Continuing Education at the Oxford University. He was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and has held teaching positions at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Hong Kong, and on the Yale in London programme. Sean’s interests span art, photography and print culture in the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the visual legacies of the British Empire. He is Reviews Editor at the journal History of Photography. His first book, Victorian Visions of War and Peace: Violence, Sovereignty and Empire, c. 1851-1900, was published with Yale University Press in 2021.
Speaker
Amy Halliday is a contemporary art curator, museum educator, and arts consultant from South Africa who currently works across the USA and UK. She has Masters degrees in Art History (UCL) and Teaching (Smith College) and over a decade of experience working at the interdisciplinary intersection of art and academia, including as Director of the Center for the Arts at Northeastern University, Boston, and as Director of the Hampshire College Art Gallery, Amherst, MA.
