Fellow 2022-2023JULIET SIMPSON
Juliet Simpson (MA St Andrews, DPhil. University of Oxford) is Full Professor of Art History (Modern and Contemporary), Chair of Cultural Memory and Research Director for the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University, UK. She is a specialist in long nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and visual culture, with a particular focus on fin-de-siècle art and cultural memory, word and image interactions, art and the emotions, pre-modern art historiography and afterlives of Gothic and Northern Renaissance visual cultures on which she has taught, lectured and published extensively. Recent publications include her edited book, co-edited with A.-M. von Bonsdorff, T. Bauduin and J. Baetens, Gothic Modernisms – Enchanted Spaces of Art and Modernity, 1880-1930s (forthcoming, Peter Lang: 2023), and articles on Ferdinand Hodler’s Cosmopolitanism (2019),
‘Re-imagining the Northern Gothic Art Tour’ (2021), ‘Lucas Cranach between Nation and Alterity’( 2020), ‘Baudelaire’s Uncanny Urban “Spirituel”’ (2022) and forthcoming her special issue, co-edited with Gabriele Rippl on ‘Emotional Objects: Northern Renaissance Afterlives in Objects, Images and Texts’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance (spring 2023). Awards include from the UKRI, AHRC, Leverhulme Trust, British Academy, Paul Mellon for Studies in British Art, CNRS, Paris, the Royal Netherlands Academy and the German Research Foundation (DFK). Professor Simpson has held a Visiting Professorship (by award) at the University of Amsterdam-Rijksmuseum (2017-18), and Visiting Fellowships at Wolfson College, Oxford and most recently at the Warburg Institute, University of London (2019-22). She is Guest Curator and Principal Lead for the international scholarly exhibition and research publication, Gothic Modern, 1875–1925: Munch to Kollwitz in partnership with Ateneum (Finnish National Gallery), Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin and Nationalmuseum, Oslo (Helsinki, Ateneum-Oslo, Nationalmuseum-Berlin Alte Nationalgalerie, 2024-25). Professor Simpson is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts and Royal Historical Society, UK. She is Advisory Partner for the British Council (Venice Fellowships Programme); she sits on the International Review Board and as Co-Chair for the Swiss National Science Foundation Starter and Consolidator Grants programme, and the International Editorial Board of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide.
Time after Time – Apocalypse, Revelation, Eschaton in Image, Object and Word, 1919-1933
The sense of endings, of catastrophic human, social and cultural collapse, of a post-Apocalypse world, was omnipresent in Europe’s politics and cultures, and in their global interactions in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet these entwine with complex visions of ‘Judgement’ and ‘Revelation’ in attempts by artists, historians and literary writers at this period to navigate a ‘time after time’ – the Eschaton. This project seeks to put post-Apocalypse, focusing on Revelation and Eschaton, at the heart of how we conceptualize and communicate the pivotal contributions of artists and collectors, as well as of writers and historians of art as creators and world-makers at a critical period in Europe’s history and identity-construction. Its key objective is to open new scientific knowledge about how we perceive key artistic, cultural and temporal innovations of interwar Europe (challenging their construction as ‘modernist’). Indeed, the broader ambition of 'Time after Time', is to bring to visibility the importance of eschatological thinking, imaging and creation in new concepts of revelation and ‘illumination’ that envisage the heuristic and spiritual possibility of a ‘time’ and ‘order’ beyond Enlightenment models.