Dr Jenny Graham

Biography

Associate Professor and Admissions Tutor for Art History

Qualifications

PhD University of Reading 2002

Teaching

Teaching interests

Undergraduate

ARH4001 Lives and Afterlives of Renaissance Artists

ARH4005 Cultural Practices in Context (museums module)

ANT4005 Cultural Practices in Context (museums module)

ARH5001 Collecting and Exhibiting Cultures in the 19th and 20th Centuries

ARH5006 Victorian Values

ARH6005 Victorian Values

ARH5007 Regimes and Revolutions: European Art 1750-1850

ARH6007 Regimes and Revolutions: European Art 1750-1850

ARH6001 Dissertation

Postgraduate

ResM and PhD supervision

Staff serving as external examiners

University of Kent, External Examiner for BA (Hons) History and Philosophy of Art; Art History; Art & Film (2021 to the present)

University of Buckingham, External Examiner, Dissertations, MA History of Art: Renaissance to Modernism (2015 to the present)

University of Reading, External Examiner for BA (Hons) History of Art and Architecture (2010-2012)

Research

Research interests

Jenny is a specialist in the reception of the Northern and the Italian Renaissance, c.1750 to the present, particularly in the context of nationalism, war and conflict. Jenny has been researching Renaissance topics for almost two decades, during which time she has been the recipient of a Kress International Travel Fellowship to the College Art Association (CAA) 97th Annual Conference, Los Angeles, to speak in the session ‘The Object of Netherlandish Art’ (2009); a Keynote Speaker for The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Brussels (KIK/IRPA) at the international conference ‘Paul Coremans: A Belgian Monuments Man and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage Worldwide’ (2015); and an invited speaker at numerous national and international conferences at (e.g.) the Universities of Leuven, Amsterdam, Sheffield, Oxford and Cambridge. She is the author of Inventing Van Eyck: The Remaking of an Artist for the Modern Age (Berg: Oxford and New York, 2007), and her most recent work focuses on two book projects: one on the rediscovery of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists: 'Afterlives: Giorgio Vasari and the Rise of Art History in the Nineteenth Century', and the other on the history of the Van Eyck Ghent Altarpiece during and after the Second World War. The first piece from the latter project was published in the International Journal of Cultural Property for Cambridge Core in August 2021.

Other research

Selected Conference Papers and Public Lectures

National Gallery, London: International Conference, Art for the Nation: John Ruskin, Art Education and Social Change, 'Ruskin and Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists', September 2019

National Gallery, London: Study Day, A Renaissance Story of Art: Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, October 2018

National Gallery, London: Auditorium Lecture, ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral: The Arnolfini Portrait from the Sixteenth Century to the Present’, March 2018

National Gallery, London: Study Day, The Secret Language of Pre-Raphaelite Art, ‘Mirrors, Magic and Maidens: Pre-Raphaelite Responses to the Arnolfini Portrait’, February 2018

National Gallery, London: International Conference, Arnolfini Histories, ‘The ‘Strange Mirror Picture’: A Nineteenth-Century Historiography of the Arnolfini Portrait’, January 2018

Compton Verney Art Gallery & Museum: Session Chair, International Conference: Visions of the North: Reinventing the Germanic 'North' in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture in Britain and the Low Countries, June 2016

St John’s College, University of Oxford, and the Ashmolean Museum: International Conference, A Revolution in Taste: Francis Haskell’s Nineteenth Century, ‘Afterlives: Rewriting Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists in the Nineteenth Century’, October 2015

KIK/IRPA Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Brussels: Keynote Speaker, International Conference, Paul Coremans: A Belgian Monuments Man and His Impact on the Preservation of Cultural Heritage Worldwide, ‘Paul Coremans as Monuments Man: The Cultural Patrimony of the Ghent Altarpiece in the Twentieth Century’, June 2015

Newnham College, University of Cambridge: International Conference, Looted Art and Restitution in the Twentieth Century: Europe in Transnational and Global Perspective, 'The Ghent Altarpiece in the Context of War, Nationalism and Nationhood, 1945 to the present', September 2014

National Gallery, London: Session Chair, International Conference: Primitive Renaissances: Northern European and Germanic Art at the fin-de-siècle to the 1930s, April 2014

Research degrees awarded to supervised students

Stefan Aloszko, Auschwitz: Art, Commemoration and Memorialisation. From 1940 To The Present (PhD, 2012)

Donato Esposito, The Artistic Discovery of Assyria by Britain and France 1850 to 1950 (PhD, 2011)

Melinda Muscato, Victorian Children's Book Illustration and Social Change (MPhil, 2011)

Bebhinn Dungan, The Madonna and Eve in Nineteenth-Century British Art (MPhil, 2009)

Grants & contracts

Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (12 months)
Awarded for book project, Afterlives: Giorgio Vasari and the Rise of Art History in the Nineteenth Century
October 2010-October 2011

Educational Programmes Grant, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Awarded November 2009 for international conference, Reynolds Reappraised (University of Plymouth, 8-9 January 2010)

Kress International Travel Fellowship to CAA Los Angeles 97th Annual Conference, Los Angeles
Awarded January 2009

[as part of Reynolds exhibition team]
Publications Grant (Publisher) Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Awarded November 2008 for exhibition catalogue, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius (Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, 21 November 2009-21 February 2010)

[as part of Reynolds exhibition team]
Publications Grant (Author) Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Awarded November 2008 for exhibition catalogue, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius (Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, 21 November 2009-21 February 2010)

[single author]
Publications Grant (Publisher) Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Awarded November 2007 for book project, Inventing Van Eyck: The Remaking of an Artist for the Modern Age

[single author]
Publications Grant (Author) Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Awarded November 2006 for book project, Inventing Van Eyck: The Remaking of an Artist for the Modern Age

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (24 months)
Awarded to start Autumn 2003 but superseded by permanent post at Plymouth

Full-time PhD studentship, University of Reading Research Board
Awarded for three years from September 1998

Publications

Journals

Graham, J., ‘The Ghent Altarpiece After World War II: Restitution, Restoration, and Redemption’, International Journal of Cultural Property, Special Issue on Nazi-Looted Art, Vol. 28, Number 3 (August 2021), 343-367

Graham, J., ‘An Ass with Precious Things in his Panniers’: John Ruskin’s Reception of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1568)’, Journal of Art Historiography, Number 22 (June 2020), 1-33

Graham, J., ‘Amorous Passions: Vasari's Legend of Fra Filippo Lippi and the Nineteenth Century', Studi di Memofonte, Rivista On-Line della Fondazione Memofonte, In Memoria di Francis Haskell, number 12 (July 2014), 187-210

Graham, J., ‘The Artist as a Posthumous Work In Progress: Van Eyck and the Politics of Posterity’, The Low Countries: Arts and Society in Flanders and the Netherlands, 17 (2009), 247-254

Graham, J., ‘The ‘manière Gottique’: Jean-Baptiste Descamps and the Revival of Early Netherlandish Art in Eighteenth-Century France’, in ed. P. Damian-Grint, Medievalism and manière gothique in Enlightenment France, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford Voltaire Foundation, 2006), 300-334

Graham, J., 'A Note on the Early Reputation of Roger Fry’, Burlington Magazine, 143 (August 2001), 493-499

Books

Graham, J., 'Afterlives: Giorgio Vasari and the Rise of Art History in the Nineteenth Century' [in preparation]

Graham, J., Inventing Van Eyck: The Remaking of an Artist for the Modern Age (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007)

Chapters

Graham, J., ‘Picturing Patriotism: The Image of the Artist-Hero and the Belgian Nation State, 1830-1900’, in Dunthorne and Wintle (eds), The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Low Countries (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 171-197

Graham, J., ‘Artistic Inspirations’, in Prettejohn (ed), The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 32-46

Graham, J., ‘Posthumous Fortunes’, in Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius (Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, exhibition catalogue, 2009), 161-167

Other Publications

Book Review of Gabriele Guercio, Art as Existence: The Artist's Monograph and its Project; 'Mythologies of Artistic Biography: How the Artist Became', Oxford Art Journal, Volume 33, Number 1 (2010), 125-126

Book Review of John E. Law and Lene Østermark-Johansen (eds), Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance; Journal of the History of Collections, Volume 18 (2006), 294-295

Biographical Entries, Crowe, Sir Joseph Archer; and Weale, William Henry James, New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

Personal

Conferences organised

Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Reinventing the Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century, September 2004
Keynote speakers and respondents included: Michael Ann Holly (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown), Stephen Bann (University of Bristol), Marc Gotlieb (University of Toronto) and Keith Moxey (Barnard College and Columbia University)

Other academic activities

Book Review and Peer Review work
Oud Holland

Journal of Victorian Culture

Oxford University Press
Oxford Art Journal
Journal of the History of Collections

Profiles

Associate Professor (Reader) in Art History

School of Society and Culture (Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business)