Activating Art History: Researching Art History

Eva Bentcheva is an art historian and curator. She is currently an Associate Lecturer in Art History at the Centre for Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University, and a Postdoctoral Researcher/Publications Coordinator for the international project 'Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation.' She completed her PhD in Art History at SOAS, University of London. Her research and curatorial work focus on histories of conceptualism, performance art and archives in South and Southeast Asia, and their diasporas. Her previous positions have included Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre, Adjunct Researcher at the Tate Research Centre: Asia in London, and the Goethe-Institut Fellow at Haus der Kunst in Munich where she co-curated the exhibition Archives in Residence: Southeast Asia Performance Collection with Annie Jael Kwan and Damian Lentini in 2019.

Anthony Geraghty is an architectural historian based at the University of York (since 2002). He works on British architecture, particularly Christopher Wren and the English Baroque. His publications include The Sheldonian Theatre: Architecture and Learning in Seventeenth-Century Oxford, which was published by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre in 2013.

Felicity Myrone is Lead Curator of Western Prints and Drawings at the British Library. She joined the Library as Curator of Topography and led a project cataloguing and digitising George III’s maps and views, the King’s Topographical Collection and a related research project, Transforming Topography. One outcome of the latter is the British Library webspace, Picturing Places. She was awarded a 2019–20 Paul Mellon Centre Mid-career Fellowship for Art in the Library, investigating how the fused and intertwined institutional histories of the British Museum, Natural History Museum and British Library have shaped attitudes to prints and drawings. Her current project is writing a book with the support of a 2021 Getty Foundation Paper Project grant. This will be the first handbook/guide to the British Library’s prints and drawings in Printed Books, Manuscripts, Music and Maps.

Shirlynn Sham is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Yale University. She specializes in the visual culture and industrial technologies of nineteenth-century Britain and America, with an ancillary interest in film studies. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, the Huntington Library in California, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. She has recently published film criticism on the work of British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, which is forthcoming in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.