Research Interests of the Department

Professor Roger Benjamin

• French Orientalist art, 1880-1930, including Renoirs Algerian work, and a study of the Algerian oasis resort of Biskra in literature, painting and photography
• The art of Matisse, including an essay on his 1906 masterpiece Le Bonheur de Vivre
• The interpretation of contemporary Indigenous Australian art. This includes a curatorial project on early Papunya boards and their aftermath, c. 1971 c 1985, for the Actus Foundation of New York (opening at Cornell University Gallery in January 2006)
• Contemporary Australian painting

Dr Keith Broadfoot

• Modernism
• Australian art/film
• Theories of spectatorship

Professor John Clark

• Modern Japanese Art since Meiji
• Chinese academic painting and the avant-garde
• The problems of modernity in art beyond Euramerica
• Indonesian art
• Art in China and Thailand of the 1980s and 1990s
• New Biennales in Asia

Dr Laleen Jayamanne

• Cross-cultural film criticism
• Feminist film theory
• Cinema of Kumar Shahani
• Deleuzean film theory

Dr Louise Marshall

• Italian Renaissance plague images, with a particular focus on the process of intercession and the protective role of images in coping with the experience of bubonic plague.
• The imagery and cult of St. Sebastian as 'alter Christus' ('another' or 'second Christ').
• St. Nicholas of Tolentino as a 'failed' plague saint.
• Reading the body in the late drawings of Michelangelo Buonarotti

Dr Jennifer Milam

• The idea of play in 18th century France, particularly as formulated by rococo painters
• The importance of gender and age distinctions during the Enlightenment, and the role played by visual images in creating categories
• Women's patronage in the 18th century, and how commissioning and collecting as an activity was used for image power and status.

Dr Catriona Moore

• Comparative study of women modernist artists in the pre- and inter-war years from selected British Dominions and new republics (primarily New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and tangentially India)
• Contemporary feminist art and writing
• Contemporary Australian art
• Contemporary international art, with particular focus on post-colonial and feminist issues
• Electronic media.

Dr Julian Pefanis

• Information systems
• Arts policy
• Picture theory

Dr Mary Roberts

• European, especially British, art of the Nineteenth Century
• Gender, Orientalism, the history and culture of travel
• Development of Ottoman art in the Nineteenth Century and cultural exchange with European artists

Dr Richard Smith

• "The Digital Apparatus" is a research project that will test a range of methodologies for thinking through the relation between technology and thought in film production, criticism and theory. It is particularly interested in the idealist-materialist tussle within general theories of film.
• The Go Concept. Richard Smith is co-author of a documentary about sophistication. Seeking AFC O Strand funding of 20,000. Script submitted March 2005. AFC decides on successful applicants in May 2005.