New Members of the Advisory Council Announced

We are pleased to announce the appointment of four new members of the Advisory Council, joining us in July 2024.

Dr Steven Brindle

Steven Brindle comes from Blackburn in Lancashire. He read history at Keble College, Oxford and remained there to study for a doctorate on the architecture of late-medieval Spain, which was granted in 1991. He has worked for English Heritage in a variety of roles since 1989. From 1993–2000 he was an inspector in the Crown Buildings team and was closely involved in the post-fire restoration of Windsor Castle. He subsequently served as the Inspector of Ancient Monuments for Greater London. Since 2008, he has been Senior Properties Historian in the Curatorial Department. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and lectures widely on aspects of the history of architecture and engineering. He has published extensively on these subjects, with major publications including Paddington Station, Its History and Architecture (2004), Brunel, the Man Who Built the World (2005) and Windsor Castle, a Thousand Years of a Royal Palace (2018, as editor), which won the Historians of British Art’s prize for best multi-authored book. His latest book, Architecture in Britain and Ireland, 1530–1830, was published by the Paul Mellon Centre in 2023.

Dr Alexander Marr

Alexander Marr is Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall, where he is Dean of Discipline. He specialises in European and British art and architecture ca. 1400–ca. 1800, especially the intellectual, literary and scientific aspects. His awards include a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2008), a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (2013) and a Paul Mellon Centre Senior Fellowship (2022). He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Historical Society in 2013. He was the Founding Director of the Cambridge Centre for Visual Culture (CVC), is a trustee of the Walpole Society and currently serves as President of the Leonardo da Vinci Society. His books include the monographs Rubens’s Spirit: From Ingenuity to Genius (2021), Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (2018), Between Raphael and Galileo: Mutio Oddi and the Mathematical Culture of Late Renaissance Italy (2011), and the edited volumes Ingenuity in the Making (2021), The Places of Early Modern Criticism (2021) and Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (2006). He is currently writing a monograph on Hans Holbein the Younger and ingenuity (“Holbein’s Wit”) and editing Richard Haydocke’s translation of Lomazzo’s Trattato for the Modern Humanities Research Association.

Dr Romita Ray

Romita Ray is Associate Professor of Art History at Syracuse University in the United States. She holds MA, MPhil and PhD degrees in art history from Yale University and a BA degree in art history from Smith College. Romita has published widely on the art and architecture of the British Empire in India. The author of Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (2013) and The Eternal Masquerade: Prints and Paintings by Gerald Leslie Brockhurst (1890–1978) from the Jacob Burns Foundation (2006), Romita is currently working on a book on the visual cultures of tea in colonial and modern India tentatively titled, “Leafy Wonders: Art, Science, and the Aesthetics of Tea in India”. Her tea research led to the international conference, Tea, Nature, Culture, and Society, 1650–1850, which she co-organised at the Linnean Society (2022) with Richard Coulton and Jordan Goodman. Together with Jos Hackforth-Jones, she is co-editing a multi-volume project for Routledge on art, architecture, material culture and early cinema in the British Empire (forthcoming, 2025–26). Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Royal Museums Greenwich, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Centre, Huntington Library and Houghton Library. Romita was the Director of the NEH-funded “Taj of the Raj? Decolonizing the Imperial Collections, Architecture, and Gardens of the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata”, an international collaborative research project involving scholars from the UK, USA and India (2021–2023). She is also the curator of Take Me to the Palace of Love (Syracuse University Art Museum), an NEA-funded exhibition of contemporary Indian American artist Rina Banerjee’s work (Spring 2023), which was awarded a 2024 Engaging Communities Distinction Award from the Museum Association of New York. Romita serves as Executive Board Member at Large for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) and is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks.

Ming Tiampo

Ming Tiampo is Professor of Art History, and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University. She is interested in transcultural models and histories that provide new structures for understanding and reconfiguring the global. She has published on Japanese modernism, global modernisms and diaspora. Ming’s book Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received an honourable mention for the Robert Motherwell book award. In 2013, she was co-curator of the AICA award-winning Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She is currently working on three publication projects: “Transnational Cities”, which theorises the scale of the urban as a mode of reimagining transcultural intersections and the historical conditions of global modernism; “Intersecting Modernisms”, a collaborative sourcebook on global modernisms; and “Jin-me Yoon”, an Art Canada Institute book on the diasporic Korean-Canadian artist. Ming is an associate member at ICI Berlin; a member of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational Advisory Board; a fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art on the London, Asia project and co-convenor of the conference London, Asia, Art, Worlds; a founding member of TrACE, the Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Culture Exchange network, and co-lead on its Worlding Public Cultures project.

The full list of Advisory Council members can be found on our Governance webpage.