Engagement and Impact

Our engagement and impact work is guided by a shared commitment to making Art History accessible for all. The diverse and interdisciplinary research that we do in Art History is particularly effective in breaking down barriers to art and culture. By bringing art historical material and methods into dialogue with pressing contemporary issues, our researchers inspire lasting change in collaboration with UK and international partners. 

Our work takes a variety of forms: 

• Reinterpretation and digitisation projects in partnership with galleries, libraries, archives and museums (the GLAM sector) across the Four Nations
• Development of teaching resources for educators and schools that help integrate art history into the wider curriculum at primary and secondary levels
• Creating open access resources and films about art and its histories that are free to use and bring examples of historical art to bear on contemporary debates and issues
• Presenting and publishing our research internationally to non-academic audiences 

Across these diverse outputs, the department’s engagement work tackles three core areas or topics of concern. 

Art & Ecology 

Our colleagues are shaping the ways that museums and their publics respond to the Earth crisis. ‘Art and Ecology’ is an environmental reinterpretation project led by Carla Benzan and Sam Shaw that aims to make museums into spaces for intergenerational climate education and climate action. They work with museum curators and educators to bring together fine art, science and natural history, and material culture collections. Bringing together art and science, they tackle topics like flooding, insect decline, waterway pollution, and fast fashion. The project has resulted in a number of resources for the GLAM sector, teachers, and the public including short educational open-access films co-created with Scottish environmental film-maker Libby Penman and a unique toolkit for environmental reinterpretation called ‘Art is Ecology’ co-produced with partners Climate Museum UK. This project emerged from the department’s wider ecocritical research culture; Robert Wallis and Lindsay Crisp have contributed to Art and Ecology’s success as well as other engagement work related to this topic. 

Decolonising Art History

Our research also contributes to ongoing efforts to decolonise Art History by representing and giving voice to diverse communities, perspectives, and voices outside the university. Leon Wainwright is co-lead on a contemporary art exhibition and public engagement project entitled ‘Reframe & Resist: Decolonise Here and Now!’ with curator Rebecca Yeoh (HARTA Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, September 2025). An important part of their program included workshops and a public seminar run with academics, artists and the public. This work is supported by British Council’s Connections Through Culture programme with additional backing from the Living History Project, HARTA, and other partners.  Angeliki Lymberopoulou is the author of a successful Open Learn course that puts Byzantine art at the very centre of Art History; she was also invited to an online panel event with gaming communities where she brought her expertise to their experiences of Greek culture in the game. Working in Wales, William Kynan-Wilson is collaborating with an OU Classical Studies colleague on a digitisation project with the National Library of Wales ‘Opening the Archive of David Jones’ that has improved the awareness and use of this archive by the public. 

Social Justice

Colleagues also bring their research into art and activism, democracy, and social justice in the twentieth century into the present day. Amy Charlesworth has undertaken the full digitisation and captioning of an important early feminist film with Cinenova; she and partners are now using the film as the focus for workshops with trainee health care workers. Their work aims to support the destigmatising of, and access to, reproductive healthcare in the UK. Warren Carter was invited to speak at a community centre in an industrial region of Ontario, Canada, about the social and political role of Mexican muralism. Kim Charnley is part of the publication platform 'Beyond the Now' which began as an exploration of the role of socially engaged art in cultural responses to Covid-19.