ART HISTORY

Anthea Callen is Professor of Art in the School of Art, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra. She is also Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture at the University of Nottingham and Honorary Research Associate in the Institute of Health at the University of Warwick. She trained as a painter and print-maker at Birmingham College of Art and Design (UK, now Birmingham City University) before embarking on a career in art history. She spent two years researching in Paris at the Sorbonne (British Institute), gained her MA by Research in Art History from Leicester University and her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She has received a number of major fellowships and awards and has served on important national academic and scholarly bodies (see CV).

Anthea Callen lectured in art history at Warwick University before taking a Research Chair in art history at De Montfort University, where she was also Head of Research for the Faculty of Art and Design. This was followed by the Chair in Visual Culture in the Art History Department at Nottingham University. While there she initiated the foundation of a new modern art gallery for the City and was instrumental in obtaining £5M Arts Council capital funding along with Regional and European support for the project, Nottingham Contemporary, which opened to the public in Autumn 2009. It is one of the largest contemporary art spaces in the UK, with four galleries, an auditorium, an education space, a study centre, a café-bar and a shop. Callen retired early from Nottingham University in 2008, to devote more time painting, writing and traveling. In 2011 she took up the post of Chair of Art: Practice-led Research, at the Australian National University School of Art.

Anthea Callen is widely published and an internationally renowned specialist on the history of artists’ materials and techniques; she regularly collaborates with museum conservators and curators in study of the historical materials and methods of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. As a feminist she has long been interested in gender and visual representation of the human body, and published a formative text on women in design history, on the Arts and Crafts movement. Her most recent monographs are on Degas's images of women, and on the painting techniques of the Impressionists, both published by Yale University Press. She is currently completing another book for Yale, on the male body and issues of masculinity. Her latest research is for a book on painters' studios in nineteenth-century France (see BOOKS).

Anthea Callen publishes extensively, with articles in scholarly journals, book chapters and essays. Her most recent book chapter, on Seurat's drawings, appears in 'Seurat Re-viewed' (ed. Paul Smith 2010). She is currently completing the Introduction to the National Gallery of Art Washington DC's new Systematic Catalogue of late nineteenth-century French painting, to be published in 2012 (see ESSAYS).

A frequent visiting professor and international speaker, Callen gives public lectures, plenary talks and conference papers in many countries including the USA, Canada, Australia, and in Continental Europe and the UK (see EVENTS).