Current PhD Students

Sarah Roberts

I wanted a new interest. I’ve always been fascinated by the art of the early Renaissance in Italy, and so I decided to delve a little deeper and return to studying.

Hi, my name is Sarah Roberts, and I’m a final year PhD student at The Open University, studying the History of Art.

After retiring from a career in teaching, I wanted a new interest. I’ve always been fascinated by the art of the early Renaissance in Italy, and so I decided to delve a little deeper and return to studying.

I’m writing about a cycle of frescoes housed in the Palazzo Trinci in Foligno, Umbria, dating from just after 1400. Their subject matter includes figures from Roman history, mythology, and personifications of the planets and the liberal arts. They were commissioned by the ambitious “signore” of Foligno, Ugolino Trinci. Trinci had recently purchased and adapted the palazzo and wanted its decorations to promote his status and legitimacy. I’m interested in how the ideas of early humanists in his court are expressed in the images and interpreted by the artists involved. Although this is a rare early example of palace decoration in Italy, very little work has been done on it to date, especially in English, so I hope I can make a useful contribution to the existing scholarship.

The Open University was a great choice for me. My supervisors have guided me to discover new approaches and I love hearing about the varied work of other PhD students.

Dawn Kanter

The process of modelling encourages me to think critically and systematically ... and the model itself will communicate my understanding of the portrait-sitting to others.

Hi, my name is Dawn and I’m a second-year PhD student at The Open University.

My research is in the area of portraiture. I’m studying the portrait-sitting, which is an interaction between artist, sitter (the subject of the portrait) and patron. During this interaction, gazes, conversation and money are exchanged.

This research matters because we often study portraits as visual and material objects, but rarely as interactions or exchanges. By doing so, we can learn more about the relationship between portraiture and other activities that make up societies, such as forming friendships, giving gifts and making a living.

Through my work I’d like to understand how we can use portrait-sittings to learn more about portraiture as a social practice, specifically British portraiture in the period of 1900–1960. I’ll be producing a digital representation, or database model, of portrait-sittings. The process of modelling encourages me to think critically and systematically about portrait-sittings, and the model itself will communicate my understanding of the portrait-sitting to others. Additionally, a database of portrait-sittings is a tool for researching portraiture as a social practice.

Two things inspired me to do this research. Firstly, while working at the National Portrait Gallery, I discovered fascinating accounts of portrait-sittings in books and catalogues. Secondly, I contributed to The Open University’s crowdsourced UK Reading Experience Database, which collates evidence of people’s experiences of reading, and this showed me the possibility of a digital approach to gathering information about portrait-sittings.

Current PhD students

Kerry-Louise Apps - ‘The World by the Thames: Global Materiality and Elite Self-Fashioning in the Seventeenth-Century Collections of Ham House, Surrey’. OOC National Trust Collaborative Doctoral Award

Katie Ault - ‘Giotto and Non-Giotto in Nineteenth-Century Britain’. Funded by the AHRC CHASE Consortium

Lesley Burch - 'Sir Alfred East (1844-1913), One Of Britain's Foremost Landscape Artists In The Late Victorian and Edwardian Periods' (MPhil)

Bonnie Emmett - ‘Housing for single working women in interwar London 1919-1939’

Emma Hardy - ‘Utopian collaboration? William Morris, Jeffrey & Co and the Morris & Co wallpapers 1864-c.1928’

Dawn Kanter - ‘Collecting and connecting portrait-sitting experiences: a re-evaluation of experiential feedback in enhancing knowledge and understanding of portraiture’

Allan Norris - ‘On Figuration in the work of Post-Conceptual British women painters’. Funded by the AHRC CHASE Consortium

Carralyn Parkes - 'The Art of Becoming Other: British Propaganda Images, Labour Movement Campaign Materials, Refugees, Internees, and the “Enemy Within”, 1936-1945'

Anna Perceval - ‘The conceptualisation of absence and remembrance in twenty-first century art’

John Workman - ‘What is Modernist art doing in an English Church/Cathedral? An investigation into the links between the English Church and Modernism between 1914 and 1970 with particular reference to Sussex’

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