Art History and Art Curatorship

Featured research

As the first university art history program established in Australia, we have a long record of leading research in multiple fields. The program hosts the Australian Institute of Art History and, in partnership with the Victorian College of Arts, founded the University of Melbourne’s Centre of Visual Art (CoVA).

Emerging from CoVA, academics from our program and CoVA edit the refereed art history journal Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art and lead the Postnational art histories group, which examines the restlessness of contemporary thinking in extra-national and global contingencies of art.

As well as Australian art and European art, the program has recently developed a major focus on Asian art, which includes the Asian Art Research group and the Network for Islamic and Southeast Asian Art, and a unique cross-disciplinary research group of artists, archaeologists and art historians, Rock Art in the Expanded Field, which promotes awareness of rock art in Australia.

• Decentring Australian Art: Looking Past the Mainstream

  Writing the history of non-mainstream art in Australia to paint a richer, more complex picture of Australia’s artistic culture.

• Eurasian Exchange and Artistic Change in Italy, c. 1250-1450

  This project places the early Italian Renaissance into the larger geopolitical context of Mongol Eurasia, focusing on artistic change in two Italy and in China, where Italian and other foreign merchants and missionaries were resident.

• The Invention of Melbourne: A Baroque Archbishop and Gothic Architect

  Understanding the cultural vision of the first Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, James Goold (1812-1886), whose architectural patronage has left a permanent imprint on the built environment of Melbourne

• World-Pictures: Art Finding Pathways Across the Century of Turbulence, 1914-2024

  The project maps how and where artists across the world, both as subjects of these forces and as embedded or detached observers, reflected on and documented borders and bodies subjected to migration and exile.