Professional Development Day
From curating to CVs and cover letters, to grant-writing and image copyright, develop your skills at our Professional Development Day!
The Association for Art History’s Doctoral and Early Career Researcher (DECR) Committee presents the 2024 online Professional Development Day.
The Professional Development Day (this year spread across two days) offers professional advice, insights and career development opportunities targeted at those at doctoral and early career researcher stages in their career, but open to all. This online event is aimed at people working within disciplines that connect to art history in its widest sense, including arts practices, curating and other cultural fields. Themes include Curating, Grants and Bursaries, Copyright and Image Permissions and CVs and Cover letters.
This year’s programme includes a range of different presenters to discuss their professional experiences and offer advice and guidance, as well as provide a space for honest conversations about some of the challenges faced by arts professionals.
As part of this year’s programme, these sessions will be a mix of panel discussions and more practical workshops. For the workshops, the Doctoral and Early Career Research Committee invites participants to anonymously submit working drafts of grant applications and/or CVs. This will help tailor these sessions to support the current problems and challenges faced by doctoral and early career researchers in these areas.
Programme
Monday 20 May, 13.30-16.30
Curating / Galleries: Round Table
13:30-14:30
Jennifer Powell, Director, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham
John Chu, Senior Curator of Pictures and Sculpture / Senior Curator for Midlands at National Trust
Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art, Edinburgh College Art, University of Edinburgh
This panel will explore various models of curating and working with galleries, including guest curating as a means of disseminating research in art and art history. We will consider practical issues in working in gallery contexts of different scales and formats.
Grants & Bursaries: Workshop
15:00-16:30
Jo Cottrell, Development Manager, Association for Art History
Martin Myrone, Head of Grants, Fellowships, & Networks, Paul Mellon Centre
Have you ever wondered how to write a successful grant or bursary application? This workshop will explore processes and strategies for writing clear, concise, and effective funding proposals.
Once booked, you can use this link to upload your CV (and/or any questions you have about it) to help tailor the session.
Tuesday 21 May, 10.00 - 13.00
Copyright & Images Permissions: Seminar
10.00-11.00
Victoria Hooper, Head of Licensing, DACS
Publishing and disseminating research in art history often involves complex negotiations of image permissions. In this session, our invited specialists will discuss key issues and best practices around copyright and permissions for images in academic publishing contexts.
CVs & Cover Letters: Workshop
11.30-13:00
Stephanie O’Rourke, Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews.
Melissa Percival, Professor of French, Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter
Jack Hartnell, Associate Professor of Art History, University of East Anglia
This panel is for individuals seeking guidance and best practices on how to write an academic CV and cover letter. DECRs will have the opportunity to finesse their application skills in an interactive workshop led by members of the Association for Art History’s Higher Education Committee. Once booked, you can use this link to upload your CV (and/or any questions you have about it) in order to help tailor the session.
Speaker bios
John Chu
Dr John Chu is a Senior Curator at the National Trust where he has been a curator since 2015. He has curatorial responsibility for historic picture and sculpture collections nationwide, and also for all aspects of properties in the Midlands. He has lectured, published and broadcast widely on British art of the long eighteenth-century, and on art collecting in early-modern and modern homes.
Jennifer Powell
Jennifer Powell is Director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, and Barber Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham’s Department of History of Art, Curating and Visual Studies. Prior to this, she was Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge. Jennifer begun her curatorial career with the V&A before taking up the post of Assistant Curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain in 2010. She was appointed Head of Collections, Programme and Research at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, in 2013, and played a key role in the gallery’s £11.5million redevelopment project.
Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani
Dr. Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani is an art historian and curator specialising in modern and contemporary art of the global diasporas, focussing on the postcolonial histories of African, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Black British art in Britain and beyond. She earned her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, was a postdoctoral research associate at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven Connecticut, she co-curated the exhibition Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction (2022), and has held numerous curatorial positions, including the Wichita Art Museum and the Ulrich Museum of Art, in Wichita, Kansas, USA; the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, USA; and Tate Liverpool, UK.
Copyright and images
Victoria Hooper
Victoria is the Head of Licensing at DACS (the Design & Artists Copyright Society) and has worked at the organisation for 19 years. She previously held a sales role for a tourism company, but having studied the History of Art and Architecture, always wanted to work within the arts. She leads a team of 9 and is responsible for client management, driving the business development of the services, and ensuring that the services remain competitive and fit for purpose. Victoria is also actively involved in discussions with her international counterparts to understand how visual rights and negotiations are playing out in different territories.
CVs and cover letters
Stephanie O'Rourke
Stephanie O’Rourke (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. She works on 18th- and 19th-century European art and its relation to resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies.
Melissa Percival
Melissa Percival has worked for much of her career at University of Exeter, and has spent shorter periods teaching and researching in the USA, France and Germany. A historian of art, visual culture and ideas, her research centres on eighteenth-century France and its wider European and global connections. She has published on facial expression, portraiture, and the aesthetics of fantasy and imagination; her latest research is on French printed textiles. In 2013 she jointly set up Exeter’s BA in Art History and Visual Culture programme, and has been involved in academic appointments in art history and also modern languages. While serving as Associate Dean Global for Humanities at Exeter (2020-23) Melissa sat on job search and interview panels for academic positions across the humanities, and also on internal promotions panels for other disciplines.
Jack Hartnell
Jack Hartnell is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History & World Art Studies. He is an art historian and curator, with particular specialisms in the cross-continental visual culture of premodern science and its display, broadly defined to include research and curatorial work on the artistic materials of medicine, cartography, and mathematics, most recently with a strong emphasis on premodern Jewish art and culture. In 2019-20 he was the Dibner Long-Term Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library in California, and before starting at UEA he held positions as Visiting Curator at Two Temple Place, Mellon Fellow at Columbia University, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art, and the Inaugural Fellow between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. Jack's most recent book, Medieval Bodies: Life, Death, and Art in the Middle Ages, was published in 2018 by the Wellcome Collection, London. It was a Sunday Times History Book of the Year and has been translated into 8 international editions.
From curating to CVs and cover letters, to grant-writing and image copyright, develop your skills at our Professional Development Day!
The Association for Art History’s Doctoral and Early Career Researcher (DECR) Committee presents the 2024 online Professional Development Day.
The Professional Development Day (this year spread across two days) offers professional advice, insights and career development opportunities targeted at those at doctoral and early career researcher stages in their career, but open to all. This online event is aimed at people working within disciplines that connect to art history in its widest sense, including arts practices, curating and other cultural fields. Themes include Curating, Grants and Bursaries, Copyright and Image Permissions and CVs and Cover letters.
This year’s programme includes a range of different presenters to discuss their professional experiences and offer advice and guidance, as well as provide a space for honest conversations about some of the challenges faced by arts professionals.
As part of this year’s programme, these sessions will be a mix of panel discussions and more practical workshops. For the workshops, the Doctoral and Early Career Research Committee invites participants to anonymously submit working drafts of grant applications and/or CVs. This will help tailor these sessions to support the current problems and challenges faced by doctoral and early career researchers in these areas.
Programme
Monday 20 May, 13.30-16.30
Curating / Galleries: Round Table
13:30-14:30
Jennifer Powell, Director, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham
John Chu, Senior Curator of Pictures and Sculpture / Senior Curator for Midlands at National Trust
Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art, Edinburgh College Art, University of Edinburgh
This panel will explore various models of curating and working with galleries, including guest curating as a means of disseminating research in art and art history. We will consider practical issues in working in gallery contexts of different scales and formats.
Grants & Bursaries: Workshop
15:00-16:30
Jo Cottrell, Development Manager, Association for Art History
Martin Myrone, Head of Grants, Fellowships, & Networks, Paul Mellon Centre
Have you ever wondered how to write a successful grant or bursary application? This workshop will explore processes and strategies for writing clear, concise, and effective funding proposals.
Once booked, you can use this link to upload your CV (and/or any questions you have about it) to help tailor the session.
Tuesday 21 May, 10.00 - 13.00
Copyright & Images Permissions: Seminar
10.00-11.00
Victoria Hooper, Head of Licensing, DACS
Publishing and disseminating research in art history often involves complex negotiations of image permissions. In this session, our invited specialists will discuss key issues and best practices around copyright and permissions for images in academic publishing contexts.
CVs & Cover Letters: Workshop
11.30-13:00
Stephanie O’Rourke, Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews.
Melissa Percival, Professor of French, Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter
Jack Hartnell, Associate Professor of Art History, University of East Anglia
This panel is for individuals seeking guidance and best practices on how to write an academic CV and cover letter. DECRs will have the opportunity to finesse their application skills in an interactive workshop led by members of the Association for Art History’s Higher Education Committee. Once booked, you can use this link to upload your CV (and/or any questions you have about it) in order to help tailor the session.
Speaker bios
John Chu
Dr John Chu is a Senior Curator at the National Trust where he has been a curator since 2015. He has curatorial responsibility for historic picture and sculpture collections nationwide, and also for all aspects of properties in the Midlands. He has lectured, published and broadcast widely on British art of the long eighteenth-century, and on art collecting in early-modern and modern homes.
Jennifer Powell
Jennifer Powell is Director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, and Barber Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham’s Department of History of Art, Curating and Visual Studies. Prior to this, she was Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge. Jennifer begun her curatorial career with the V&A before taking up the post of Assistant Curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain in 2010. She was appointed Head of Collections, Programme and Research at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, in 2013, and played a key role in the gallery’s £11.5million redevelopment project.
Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani
Dr. Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani is an art historian and curator specialising in modern and contemporary art of the global diasporas, focussing on the postcolonial histories of African, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Black British art in Britain and beyond. She earned her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, was a postdoctoral research associate at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven Connecticut, she co-curated the exhibition Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction (2022), and has held numerous curatorial positions, including the Wichita Art Museum and the Ulrich Museum of Art, in Wichita, Kansas, USA; the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, USA; and Tate Liverpool, UK.
Copyright and images
Victoria Hooper
Victoria is the Head of Licensing at DACS (the Design & Artists Copyright Society) and has worked at the organisation for 19 years. She previously held a sales role for a tourism company, but having studied the History of Art and Architecture, always wanted to work within the arts. She leads a team of 9 and is responsible for client management, driving the business development of the services, and ensuring that the services remain competitive and fit for purpose. Victoria is also actively involved in discussions with her international counterparts to understand how visual rights and negotiations are playing out in different territories.
CVs and cover letters
Stephanie O'Rourke
Stephanie O’Rourke (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. She works on 18th- and 19th-century European art and its relation to resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies.
Melissa Percival
Melissa Percival has worked for much of her career at University of Exeter, and has spent shorter periods teaching and researching in the USA, France and Germany. A historian of art, visual culture and ideas, her research centres on eighteenth-century France and its wider European and global connections. She has published on facial expression, portraiture, and the aesthetics of fantasy and imagination; her latest research is on French printed textiles. In 2013 she jointly set up Exeter’s BA in Art History and Visual Culture programme, and has been involved in academic appointments in art history and also modern languages. While serving as Associate Dean Global for Humanities at Exeter (2020-23) Melissa sat on job search and interview panels for academic positions across the humanities, and also on internal promotions panels for other disciplines.
Jack Hartnell
Jack Hartnell is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History & World Art Studies. He is an art historian and curator, with particular specialisms in the cross-continental visual culture of premodern science and its display, broadly defined to include research and curatorial work on the artistic materials of medicine, cartography, and mathematics, most recently with a strong emphasis on premodern Jewish art and culture. In 2019-20 he was the Dibner Long-Term Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library in California, and before starting at UEA he held positions as Visiting Curator at Two Temple Place, Mellon Fellow at Columbia University, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art, and the Inaugural Fellow between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. Jack's most recent book, Medieval Bodies: Life, Death, and Art in the Middle Ages, was published in 2018 by the Wellcome Collection, London. It was a Sunday Times History Book of the Year and has been translated into 8 international editions.