A Clark Symposium

BRITISH ART 1750–1919: REFLECTIONS AND FUTURES

Bios

Gülru Çakmak is an associate professor in the department of the History of Art & Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Chief Editor of H-France Salon. She is the author of Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s (2017). Çakmak is currently at work on two book projects, one on the nineteenth-century Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi Bey, and the other on issues of materiality and process in late nineteenth-century sculpture entitled Materiality, Process, and Facture in English and French Sculpture at the End of the Nineteenth Century.

Natasha Coleman is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Multidirectional and heterochronic in approach, her research uncovers remnants of geographic distance and temporal asymmetry inherent to art created at the interstices of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century encounter between Western Europe and “the East,” and examines how artists working at these interstices mitigated or highlighted such remnants in the art they produced. Prior to attending Harvard, she received her B.A. at Columbia University and her M.A. from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art. She also has worked on a range of curatorial projects, including the British Galleries reinstallation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and an upcoming exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in 2024 on the French painter Guillaume Guillon-Lethière.

Alexis Goodin is the associate curator at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. In this role, she is responsible for researching the collections and developing special exhibitions. She recently curated Turner and Constable: The Inhabited Landscape (2018–19) and authored the accompanying publication, Turner and Constable at the Clark (2018). Her co-curating credits include Orchestrating Elegance: Alma-Tadema and Design (2017), An Eye for Excellence: Twenty Years of Collecting (2015–16), and Copycat: Reproducing Works of Art (2012). Goodin served as in-house curator for Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway (2021) and was a member of the curatorial team that installed Rodin in the United States: Confronting the Modern (2022). She completed her doctorate in the History of Art at Brown University and earned her MA from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art.

Ariel Kline is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. Her dissertation is titled “Of Monsters and Mirrors: Art and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain.”

Jeremy Melius is a historian of modern art and criticism, who has published widely on figures such as John Ruskin, Pablo Picasso, and Lee Bontecou, and on topics such as the history of connoisseurship, the afterlife of Botticelli, and the relation between photography and sculpture. His work has often been framed by the complex entanglements of word and image, and their consequences for the treatment of works of art as forms of historical evidence. Melius’ research has been supported by the Huntington Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, Villa I Tatti, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, among other institutions. In fall 2022, he was Michael Ann Holly Fellow at the Research and Academic Program at the Clark, and since January 2023 has been as a NOMIS Fellow at eikones – Zentrum für die Theorie und Geschichtes des Bildes, Universität Basel in Switzerland. 

Iris Moon is an associate curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. At the Met, she participated in the reinstallation of the British galleries and she is currently planning a 2025 exhibition on Chinoiserie, women, and the porcelain imaginary. She is the author of Luxury after the Terror (2022), and co-editor, with Richard Taws, of Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France (2021). Melancholy Wedgwood will be published January 2024 with MIT Press. In addition to curatorial work, she teaches at Cooper Union.

Sam Rose is senior lecturer in art history at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, where he teaches courses on modernism, British art, and the history and theory of art history. He is the author of Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism (2019) and Interpreting Art (2022).

For any questions, please contact [email protected].