“What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks?”: The Window as Protagonist in British Architecture and Visual Culture

Jasmine Allen is Director and Curator of the Stained Glass Museum, nestled in the heights of Ely Cathedral. Her research interests are post-medieval stained glass, particularly the religious, social and cultural aspects of stained glass in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her book Windows for the World: Nineteenth-century Stained Glass and the International Exhibitions, 1851–1900 (Manchester University Press, 2018) stemmed from her PhD research, carried out at the University of York and awarded in 2013. In 2020 she co-edited a special issue of the journal 19 entitled Reframing Stained Glass in the Nineteenth-Century British World (2020). She has contributed chapters to various edited collections, including New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-century Britain (Manchester University Press, 2016), Victorian Material Culture. Vol VI. Victorian Arts (Routledge, 2022) and Women Pioneers of the Arts & Crafts Movement (Thames & Hudson, 2024). 

Alexandra Ault is Lead Curator of Manuscripts (1601–1850) at the British Library. In this role she has curated a number of exhibitions and published works including Poems in Progress: Drafts from Master Poets (2022). Prior to this she was a watercolours and drawings specialist at Bonhams Auctioneers before moving to the National Portrait Gallery as an assistant curator. Her PhD considered the Printsellers Association and the trade and display of fine art prints in the second half of the nineteenth century. Alexandra's work is informed by the physical properties of objects, as well as their trade, consumption and display. 

Shaona Barik has been working as an assistant professor of English literature at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India since 2013. She completed her undergraduate and postgraduate education at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, earning a PhD degree in 2019. The title of her thesis is, “Haunted by the Empire: Representations of the Occult and the Uncanny in Colonial Fictions about India, 1870–1940”. She was awarded the Charles Wallace Visiting Fellowship funded by Charles Wallace India Trust (CWIT) for three months in 2023 at the Department of History, University of Leeds, to conduct research on the Indian occult objects which travelled to England from India during the nineteenth century and their impact upon the material culture of nineteenth-century England. She has signed a book contract with Vernon Press to publish British and Other European Encounters with the Occult and the Uncanny in Colonial India (1840–1920): Cultural and Historical Perspectives in April, 2024. She is an associate fellow at the Royal Historical Society, UK, a position she was awarded. She has published, in books and journals, articles related to the area of her research and has presented papers at various international seminars and conferences. 

Ellie Brown is a PhD student at the University of Warwick, where her research examines the architectural design of the 1970s shopping centre in Britain. Drawing on a background in art history, with an interest in twentieth-century modernism in art and architecture, her research uses visual and material sources (photography, film, advertising, designed objects, sculpture and building materials) to unpick the ways in which shopping centres were sold to different publics. As part of this PhD, Ellie worked with the Twentieth Century Society for a Midlands4Cities/AHRC-funded placement to expand this research, looking at spaces of consumption in post-war Britain more generally.   

Sria Chatterjee is Head of Research and Learning at the Paul Mellon Centre. Sria’s research interests lie at the intersection of art, science and environment and she publishes extensively on these topics. Sria leads the multi-year Climate & Colonialism research project at the Paul Mellon Centre. In 2020, she founded and led the award-winning digital project, Visualizing the Virus.

Before coming to the Paul Mellon Centre, Sria was a fellow at the Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and an advanced researcher at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel, Switzerland, where she held a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship. She served as a contributing editor for British Art Studies from 2020–22 and remains involved in the journal as Editorial Advisor. In 2024, Sria is on research leave from the Paul Mellon Centre on a fellowship at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. In 2023, Sria served as a judge for the Pen Hessell-Tiltman Prize for historical non-fiction. Sria received her PhD from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University in 2019.

Ruth Ezra is lecturer in art history at the University of St Andrews, specialising in the material and visual culture of early-modern northern Europe. After completing her PhD at Harvard University, she served as a postdoctoral scholar with the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities. From 2022–23, she was a NOMIS fellow at eikones, Universität Basel, where she convened the international workshop, “Materializing Transparency”. Her current book project, Leaves of Glass: Mica Between Art and Science in Early Modernity, has received additional support from the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC), the Historians of Netherlandish Art, the Design History Society, INHA and the Henry Moore Foundation. 

Christina Faraday FSA FRHistS is an historian of art and ideas, with a special interest in Tudor and Stuart Britain and the wider sixteenth- and seventeenth-century world. She is a research fellow in history of art at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and a BBC New Generation Thinker. She is also a trustee of the Walpole Society for the study of British art history and hosts British Art Matters, the official podcast of the William M.B. Berger Prize. Her first book, Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England was published by PMC in April 2023. Her next book, The Story of Tudor Art, will be published by Head of Zeus in 2025. 

Albie Fay is a recent graduate with first-class honours in history and sociology from the University of Manchester. His dissertation, which explored the dynamics of urban unrest and its portrayal through photojournalism, focused on The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the American Civil Rights Movement. This experience ignited a passion for understanding how visual media and culture shapes our perception of social and political events. He is particularly drawn to the symbolism of the window in relation to these themes. The window serves as a powerful metaphor, representing transparency, barriers and perspectives; exploring this symbolism further offers a compelling lens through which to examine the interplay of observation, representation and social change. Currently, he is interning at Disegno Journal, a leading design magazine. This internship has allowed him to hone his research and writing skills in a fast-paced and dynamic environment within their London office. 

Benet Ge is a student at Williams College studying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, with interests in British and French Atlantic decorative arts and print media. He researches transparency as a coveted material property and racialised discourse from the time of Hogarth, through to optical toys and the emergence of lens-based media, and into early expanded cinema. His work has been supported by the French Porcelain Society and he has held curatorial and research positions for the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Guillaume Lethière and Humane Ecology at the Clark Art Institute, and collections at the Williams College Museum of Art and Exeter College in Oxford University.

Laura Harris is a cultural sociologist of art specialising in place. Her recent work has used the window as a way of thinking sociologically about the built environment, as shown by her 2021 paper “Looking Beyond Interaction: Exploring Meaning Making Through the Windows of an Art Gallery” in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. She is currently an Anniversary Fellow at the University of Southampton, book reviews editor at Cultural Sociology and convenor of the British Sociological Association’s Sociology of the Arts network. Outside of academia, she writes for Art Monthly on the sociology of the contemporary arts sector. 

Victoria Hepburn is a specialist in nineteenth-century British art. She recently completed a PhD at Yale University on the art of William Bell Scott. She is currently a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art. In 2021, she was the Amy P. Goldman Fellow in Pre-Raphaelite Studies at the Delaware Art Museum. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from PMC and Princeton University. She was co-curator in 2019 of Unto this Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin at the Yale Center for British Art and Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village. 

Birgitta Huse is a social anthropologist, independent researcher, lecturer and writer working on material culture and visual anthropology and is based in London. She studied at the Universities of London (SOAS), Tübingen (MA) and Freiburg (PhD), Germany, and lectured at Winchester School of Art/University of Southampton, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México UNAM UK Centre for Mexican Studies at King’s College London, Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, and the Institute of Art and Material Culture, University of Dortmund, Germany. Birgitta’s research about Indigenous fashion and tourism in a Mexican Maya community since 1989 is supported by the German and Mexican governments (DAAD, SRE, CONAHCYT). Birgitta has published four books and writes for professional journals and magazines. A publication with Bloomsbury Publishing is forthcoming. Her work for institutions of culture and adult learning includes UNESCO, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the German ifa Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, Stuttgart. 

Steven Lauritano is a university lecturer in architectural history at Leiden University and a member of the Centre for the Arts in Society. He received his PhD in the history of art from Yale University and the master of architecture from Princeton University. His research examines the intersection of architecture and antiquarianism, the history of architectural preservation and the reciprocal relationships that connect historiography and design. Ongoing projects include the study of Fischer von Erlach’s enigmatic vases in the Entwurff einer historischen Architectur and a book manuscript on Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s diverse experiments with architectural reuse. His essays and translations have appeared in academic journals including Architectural Theory Review, Perspecta, Gradient, Dimensions and Pidgin. 

Alice Mercier is a writer and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded PhD researcher in visual culture at the University of Westminster. Her research studies how nineteenth-century photography was theorised through short fiction of the time. She holds a BA in photographic arts, and an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University where she taught undergraduate writing. Her fiction appears in EPOCH magazine, The Cupboard Pamphlet, The Wax Paper and SmokeLong Quarterly, and her essay titled “The Photography of Short Stories” is published in the Journal of the Short Story in English. 

Jeremy Musson is an architectural historian; he studied at UCL and the Warburg Institute and was an assistant curator for the National Trust and architectural editor at Country Life, 1998–2007. He is the author of a number of books on the country house, including English Country House Interiors (2011) and The Drawing Room (2014), and was co-writer and presenter of BBC2’s The Curious House Guest. A heritage consultant since 2007, Jeremy has worked on projects including Hardwick Hall and St Paul’s Cathedral. He is editor of The Victorian and teaches on the building history masters course at the University of Cambridge; a senior research fellow of the Humanities Research Institute of the University of Buckingham; and a supervisor of students at New York University (NYU) in London. He is also a trustee of the Historic Houses Foundation. He was a contributing author to the revision of the Buildings of England: Sussex West with Elizabeth Williamson, Tim Hudson and Ian Narin. 

Naomi Polonsky is an early-career curator, researcher and writer. She is currently assistant curator (House and Collection) at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, where she supports on the care and conservation of the house, collection and archive, and related displays, exhibitions, research and events. Previously, she worked at The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, contributing to the research project “Unlocking The Women’s Art Collection”. She has an MA in curating the art museum from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a BA in modern languages from the University of Oxford. 

Francesca Saggini is professor in English literature at the Università della Tuscia (Italy). Francesca is the author of five books, and she has edited twelve collections and special journal issues. Many of her essays and chapters engage with popular fiction and genre literature. Francesca has held numerous international fellowships (in Canada, Germany, Italy and the UK) and speaks regularly at conferences, seminars and public events. Among her recent publications in Gothic Studies are: Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein's Afterlives (co-ed. A.E. Soccio, Bucknell UP, 2018); “The Gothic in Nineteenth-century Italy” (in The Cambridge History of the Gothic, 2020); Il Fantasma in Salotto. Dentro al Fantastico dell’Ottocento (Unicopli, 2020). 

Deborah Schultz is senior lecturer in art history and Course Leader of the BA Art History at Regent’s University London. Her research explores institutional critique, photographic practices and archives, and the representation of memory in twentieth-century and contemporary art. Her PhD thesis at the University of Oxford was published as Marcel Broodthaers: Strategy and Dialogue (Peter Lang, 2007) and she is co-convenor with Andrew Chesher of the conference London’s Art Networks and Marcel Broodthaers in the 1970s (London, 2023). She has recently co-edited with Geraldine Johnson Photo Archives and the Place of Photography (London, 2024). She is a regular contributor to Art Monthly and other contemporary art journals. 

Vajdon Sohaili is assistant professor of art history and contemporary culture at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD), in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He received his MA in art history from the University of Toronto and his PhD in architectural history and theory from Princeton University. Drawing on critical theory and emphasising issues of reception and embodiment, Vajdon’s research situates architecture, art and mass media within social and political histories of global modernity. His former and forthcoming publication credits include British Art Studies, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the American Book Review, and an anthology chapter on “Middle Eastern Architecture in the Americas” from Intellect Books. 

Francesca Strobino has recently earned her doctoral degree in photographic history and visual studies from the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC), De Montfort University with a thesis on William Henry Fox Talbot’s experiments in photomechanical printing. She studied cultural heritages (BA, University of Urbino) and art history (MA, University of Florence), before coming to the UK for a masters degree in photographic history (De Montfort University). Her research interests revolve around the use of photography in nineteenth-century scientific contexts, with particular emphasis on material culture and experimental practices. Francesca took part in inventory projects at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and in Fotosammlung Ruth und Peter Herzog, Basel. She also held a research fellowship at the University of Florence and a Curran Fellowship. She works as an independent scientific consultant for international institutions including past collaborations with Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia and Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. She is a graduate fellow of the Royal Historical Society. 

Rebecca Tropp is the Archivist at Crosby Moran Hall in London and an affiliated lecturer in history of art at the University of Cambridge. She previously served as the Research and Events Convener at the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC), during which time this conference was conceived. She holds a PhD in history of art from the University of Cambridge and a BA in the history and theory of architecture from Columbia University. Her research focuses on changing relationships between architecture and landscape in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and its global empire under the influence of the picturesque movement. 

Sarah Turner is an art historian, curator and writer. She is Director at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. Her aim is to share the work and resources of the Paul Mellon Centre as widely as possible and to open up new conversations, ideas and narratives about the histories of British art. From 2008–2013 she was Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at the University of York and was Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art between 2016–2018. Sarah is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of British Art Studies, an award-winning digital arts publication. With Jo Baring, she is co-host of the Sculpting Lives podcast.

Sarah is a member of the Advisory Group of the Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain, 1945–1965 exhibition.

A full list of Sarah’s publications, exhibitions and projects are listed at https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/about/people/sarah-victoria-turner