Profile

Biography

BA, MA, PhD (Cantab)

After completing a PhD in English at King's College, Cambridge, which explored ideas derived from Victorian evolutionary theory and molecular physics in W.B. Yeats's prose, Jason has been a research fellow at the Henry Moore Institute for the Study in Sculpture in Leeds and at the Yale Center for British Art, and a Henry Moore Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of York.

In Summer 2010, Jason was a visiting research fellow at Tate Britain, where he completed a new online 'Object in Focus' resource on Edward Onslow Ford's The Singer and Applause.

Departmental roles

Having previously co-directed the Sculpture Studies Research School and directed the British Art Research School, Jason is now Director of the University's Interdisciplinary Centre for Modern Studies. Jason is also a member of the History/History of Art Executive Committee.

In addition, Jason is currently an advisor on the interdisciplinary Higher Education Academy Project Developing Teaching and Training for Performing Classical and Modern Plays.

Jason is also Chair of the Research Committee and a member of the Senior Management Team.

Research

Overview

• British sculpture, c. 1769-1940: Global Contexts
• Queer Theory, especially Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• Animal studies

Jason is currently involved in three projects. The first, a synoptic exhibition of Victorian Sculpture, will open first at the Yale Center for British Art in Fall 2014, then at a significant London venue. He is hard at work on a new monograph, Two Arts, Fat and Thin, on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work in fibre and on paper; and is co-editing, with Sarah Burnage, a new collection of essays on 'The 'British' School of Sculpture, c.1760-1830".

Research group(s)

• British Art
• Sculpture Studies
• Modern and Contemporary Cluster
• Medieval Art and Medievalisms
• Architectural History and Theory
• Centre for Complex Systems Analysis

Grants

• AHRC award for Displaying Victorian Sculpture
  In Autumn 2009, Jason was awarded a c.£410,000 AHRC award, as the co-investigator, with Professor Michael Hatt at the University of Warwick, of a major three-year research project, Displaying Victorian Sculpture. The project, which is also in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, focuses on the ubiquitous display of sculpture in 19th-century Britain and its colonies, and will culminate in the first synoptic exhibition of Victorian sculpture anywhere in the world. The project funds Claire Jones, as a post-doctoral research fellow, and Gabriel Williams and Eoin Martin, as doctoral students.
• Philip Leverhulme Prize and others
  In addition to receiving a £70,000 Philip Leverhulme Prize in October 2006, Jason has also received funding from the British Academy, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Tufts University, Henry Moore Foundation, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, AHRC Centre for the Study of Surrealism, the Historians of British Art, the Jim Matthew Fund, New Mexico State University, the Elephant Trust, and the University of York.

Supervision

Jason's AHRC funded supervision includes PhDs upon:

• Sculpture at the Victorian International Exhibitions
• Sculpture in the Princess Louise Circle
• Sculpture in Victorian South Kensington
• Victoria, Albert and Sculpture
• Sculpture in the Circum-Atlantic World: Herbert Ward’s Congolese Bronzes in Europe and America 1884-present
• Visualizing: Victorian Women Artists
• Sculpture and the Decorative Arts in Nineteenth-Century France
• The Life and Work of Simeon Solomon after his Arrest
• The Arts and Crafts Object
• Stained Glass at the Great Exhibitions

Publications

Selected publications

• "A Queer Variety of Natural History"? Staging the Mid-Victorian in Edmund Gosse's Sculptural Criticism, c.1890-1907, in Martina Droth and Peter Trippi, eds, Change/Continuity: Writing about Art in Britain Before and After 1900 (Ashgate, 2013).
• 'War and Peace: Harry Bates's Lord Roberts Memorial in Calcutta, London and Glasgow, 1898-1924', in Julie Codell, ed., Transculturation in British Art, 1770-1930 (Ashgate, 2012).
• 'Two Arts, Fat and Thin: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as Fibre Artist' in Michael O'Rourke, ed., Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Ashgate, 2011).
• 'Queer and Now: On Etty's Autobiography (1849) and Male Nude with Upraised Arms (1830)', in Sarah Burnage and Mark Hallet, eds, William Etty (York: York City Art Gallery, 2011).
• '"By Abstraction Springs Forth Ideal Beauty?": John Gibson's Modernity', in Sarah Monks et al, eds, Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in Britain, 1768-1848 (Ashgate, 2011).
• '"Tell Me Not Wherein I Seem Unnatural”: Queer Meditations upon Coriolanus in the Time of War', in Madhavi Menon, ed., Shakesqueer (Duke University Press, 2010).
• 'From the East India Company to the West Indies, and Beyond: The Global Contexts of British Sculpture, c.1757-1947', Visual Culture in Britain (Spring 2010), 147-172.
• 'Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: In the Bardo (2 May 1950-12 April 2009)', Sexualities (2009), 675-677.
• 'Rethinking the Victorian Interior: An Eclectic, Collabroative Introduction', in Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart (eds), Rethinking the Interior: Aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts Movement, 1867-1896 (Ashgate, 2009), 1-24. Co-authored with Imogen Hart.
• 'The Lessons of Leighton House: Aesthetics, Politics, Erotics', in Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart (eds), Rethinking the Interior: Aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts Movement, 1867-1896 (Ashgate, 2009), 85-110.

Monographs

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Routledge, 2008).
• Alfred Gilbert's Aestheticism: Gilbert Amongst Whistler, Wilde, Leighton, Pater and Burne-Jones (Ashgate, 2006).

Edited Collections

• Victorian Sculpture in its Global Contexts , special issue of Visual Culture in Britain (Spring 2010). Co-edited with Michael Hatt.
• Rethinking the Interior: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts, 1867-1896 (Ashgate, 2009). Co-edited with Imogen Hart.
• Joseph Cornell: Opening the Box (Peter Lang, 2007). Co-edited with Stephanie L. Taylor.
• Anxious Flirtations: Homoeroticism, Art and Aestheticism in Victorian Britain, special issue of Visual Culture in Britain 8.1 (Spring 2007).

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Casts & Cultures: The Crystal Palace, Sydenham
  
• The 'British School': Sculpture in Britain, c. 1760-1837
• Sculpture in the Circum-Atlantic World
  
• Victorian Sculpture
• The Cultures of Sculpture, c.1815-1918
• Victorian Art
• Word and Image in the Nineteenth Century
• Art in Paris
• Twentieth-Century Sculpture

Postgraduate

• Queering Theory: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• Two Arts, Fat and Thin: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Works in Fibre and Paper
• English Sculpture, 1848-1899
• English Sculpture, 1900-1939
• Frederic Leighton
• Visuality in English and French Painting, 1848-1918
• Nostalgia, Conservatism and Modernity: Anglo-French Art Between the Wars
• The Art of War: The St Paul's Pantheon

External activities

Editorial duties

• Visual Culture in Britain
  Member, editorial board
• British Art: Global Contexts series (Ashgate)
  Co-commissioning editor with Sarah Victoria Turner and Sarah Monks

Invited talks and conferences

Conference organisation

• Queer/Things, co-organised with Bob Mills and Ben Nichols
  King's College, London June 2013

• Queer Animals, co-organised with Bob Mills and Ben Nichols
  King's College London, June 2012

• On Sentimentality, co-organised with Nicola Bown
  University of York, May 2011

• The Here and Now: Thinking the Contemporary Across Disciplines, co-organised with Mike Savage.
  University of York April 2011

• Thinking Niche, co-organised with Helen Hills
  University of York, May 2010

• Victorian Sculpture in its Global Contexts
  November 2008, NAVSA, at Yale

• Nineteenth-Century Sculpture in the Circum-Atlantic World
  February 2008, University of York
  
• Revisiting Victorian Sculpture
  February 2007, University of York
  
• Theorising Relief, Renaissance, Victorian, Modernist
  November 2006, University of York
  
• The Aesthetic Interior
  October 2005, Institute of English Studies, co-organised with Imogen Hart
  
• English Sculpture 1780-1940, New Perspectives
  June 2005, University of York
  
• Boxing Clever, A Centennial Re-Appraisal of Joseph Cornell
  September 2003, Centre for Studies in Surrealism, University of Essex, co-organised with Stephanie L. Taylor
  
• Anxious Flirtations, Homoeroticism, Art, and Aestheticism in Late Victorian Britain
  July 2001, Institute for English Studies, University of London
  
• Sculpture, Literature, Symbolism and Its Legacy
  March 1997, Henry Moore Institute, co-organised with Fiona Russell

Forthcoming and recent talks

• ‘Eve’s Queer Menagerie’, Queer/Animals
  King’sCollege, London: June 2012.
• ‘For Beauty is a Series of Hypotheses? On Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Bodhisattva Fractal World’ University of Manchester: January 2012.
• ‘Living (with Animals) Beyond Theory?’, Living Beyond Theory symposium
  University of York: January 2012.
• ‘Packing William Etty? Sleeping Nymph with Satyrs (1828)’,
  Unpacking William Etty Conference: York City Art Gallery: November 2011.
• ‘Paper Worlds: The Cultural Geographyof the Sydenham Portrait Gallery’, What is to Become of the Crystal Palace?
  The Crystal Palace After 1851 conference:University of York, June 2011.
• ‘The World of Victorian Portraiture:The Portrait Gallery of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, c.1854’ Plaster Casts at South Kensington: Reproducing Art in the Nineteenth Century,
  V&A: May 2011.
• ‘The Cultural Geographies and Ecologies of Victorian Sculpture’, The Parry Lecture (given with Michael Hatt),
  University of Bristol: May 2011.
• ‘On the Here and Now, or, How Betterto Be Here Now: Thinking Through, and Into, the Contemporary Across Academic (and Spiritual) Disciplines’, The Here and Now: Thinking the Contemporary Across Disciplines,
  University of York: April 2011
• The Epistemology of William Ettys Closet
  April 2011, Emory University
• Materialising Interiority?
  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks Patchwork Panels, November 2010, Yale University
• Displaying Victorian Sculpture, The Proposition
  October 2010, Humanities Research Centre, University of York
• For Beauty is a Series of Hypotheses?
  On Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Bodhisattva Fractal World, October 2010, Graduate Center, City University of New York
• Hollow Embrace: Thinking Niche
  May 2010, University of York
• White Spaces: Epistemology of the Closet Reconsidered
  May 2010, Kings College, London
• The World of Victorian Sculpture
  February 2010, University of York
• War and Peace: Harry Bates's Lord Roberts Memorial in London, Glasgow and Calcutta, c 1895-1930
  November 2009, University of York
• We Have Never Been Modern? The Antiquity of John Gibsons Modernity
  The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture, July 2009, University of Bristol
• Whilst We Were Sleeping: On Not Forgetting Edmonia Lewis
  July 2009, University of York
• Another World? Trans-National Trends in Victorian Sculpture
  January 2009, The University of York