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Doctor Kathleen Christian, Senior Lecturer in Art History

The Open University under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license Kathleen Christian specialises in Italian Renaissance art with a focus on the reception of antiquity in early modern Italy, the patronage, the display and collecting of sculpture, and garden history. After completing her dissertation at Harvard on antiquities collecting in Renaissance Rome, she was assistant professor of Italian Renaissance art for six years at the University of Pittsburgh. She joined The Open University in 2012.

Her book Empire Without End appeared with Yale University Press in 2010 and won the Society of Architectural Historians’ 2012 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award. Empire Without End traces the birth of antiquities collecting in Rome and the reception of antique sculpture from the era of Petrarch until the Sack of Rome.

Her current research project is a book on Michelangelo’s Bacchus and the culture of antiquarianism and patronage in Renaissance Rome. She regularly contributes to exhibitions such as Portable Classic at the Fondazione Prada Museum in Venice, a show on Marcantonio Raimondi at the Whitworth Gallery and an upcoming exhibition of the Torlonia marbles at the Capitoline Museums in Rome.

At the OU she has been co-chair of A344, Art and its Global Histories, a module which aligns with the content of Civilisations. She is interested in cross-cultural and global connections in the Renaissance, and the visual culture of Europe’s relationship with Africa, Asia, and America in this period.

She has taught a seminar on ‘The Global Renaissance’ at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Zurich.  Other courses she has taught include Venetian painting, Antiquity in the Renaissance, and the methods and theory of art history.

Find out more about Kathleen and her research on the OU profile site 

Professor Gill Perry, Emeritus Professor of Art History

The Open University under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license Gill Perry joined The Open University in 1977, was Head of Department from 2005-08, and Head of Research and External Collaborations from 2005-2017.

She has published books, articles and catalogue introductions on modern and contemporary European art, and eighteenth century British art, and has a particular research interest in issues of gender difference within art history and visual culture.

Her most recent book Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art (2013) explores the role of the house and ‘home’ in modern visual art. An earlier book Spectacular Flirtations (shortlisted for the 2008 Theatre Book Prize) explores issues of gender, spectatorship and femininity in eighteenth century theatrical portraits, while her edited collection, Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art (2004) looks at the role of gender difference and ideas of ‘feminine excess’ in the work of some contemporary women.

In 2011 she curated a show at the Royal Society, Crystal World, which explored the use of crystals in contemporary art. She also curated a major exhibition The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2011-2012. She edited and co-authored a catalogue The First Actresses which accompanied the show, and which explores the roles of feminine portraiture in the construction of eighteenth century celebrity culture. Recent publications include a catalogue essay on women artists and the home ‘Traces of Home and Changes of Skin’ for the exhibition Women House  at the Monnaie de Paris and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington (2017-18).

She has chaired several Art History courses, including A316 Modern Art: Practices and Debates at third level, and A216 Art and its Histories at second level.

Find out more about Gill and her research on the OU profile site