Dr Sarah Victoria Turner
Lecturer

Profile

Biography

BA (Cantab), MA (Leeds), PhD (London)

Sarah Victoria Turner is a lecturer specialising in art and visual culture in Britain and the British Empire, c. 1800-1950. She joined the History of Art Department in 2008 after completing her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Sarah’s work interrogates the connections between art, modernity and empire and she is currently working on visual representations of London as an imperial metropolis in Victorian and Edwardian art. She is particularly interested in the cross-cultural contacts between Britain and South Asia and has recently published on the impact of South Asian sculpture on artists in Britain. Sarah has an MA in Sculpture Studies from the University of Leeds and she continues to work on modern sculpture, with a particular interest in materiality and the politics and ethics of making. She teaches a broad range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on nineteenth and twentieth-century art in Britain and the British Empire, Europe and America.

Sarah is involved in a number of projects which explore the issues of global artistic and cultural exchange beyond national boundaries. She is collaborating with Grace Brockington (University of Bristol) on an international research network, Internationalism and Cultural Exchange, c. 1880-1920 (ICE). She is also the visual arts consultant for the AHRC-funded Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, c. 1870-1950 and has recently been appointed as the director of the Cultures of the Global research strand of the Centre for Modern Studies at the University of York.

Departmental roles

University roles

  • Director of Cultures of the Global research strand, Centre for Modern Studies
  • 50th Anniversary Operations Committee member

Research

Overview

  • Art and visual culture in Britain and the British Empire (with a particular interest in South Asia), c. 1800-1950
  • Global and transnational networks of artistic practices
  • Sculpture in the twentieth century

Highlighting the significance of cultural exchange and encounter within the context of the British Empire c. 1800-1950, Sarah’s research examines how objects, images, ideas and individuals move across national, socio-political and chronological boundaries, as well as through the social and professional webs which structure artistic practice.

Current projects

Sarah’s current research project focuses on cultural networks in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain and the British Empire, exploring issues of artistic identity and affiliation in particular. She is revising her doctoral thesis for publication and this is provisionally titled Breaching Boundaries: art, empire and modernity in early twentieth-century London. This work questions the ‘island story’ of much of the writing on British art by tracing the impact of imperialism on the domestic cultural landscape. By presenting London as an imperial space, this book aims to breach the conventional boundaries of British art. Sarah is particularly interested in exploring the usefulness of national boundaries for art-historical scholarship. This project also reveals the presence and significance of inter-colonial networks and communities of artists who gathered in imperial London. Sarah has worked on a number of different art societies and cultural groups in this period, including the India Society, founded by the painter William Rothenstein in 1910, the Theosophical Art Circle, and the artistic avant-garde in pre-First World War London.

Sarah has contributed to a number of exhibitions and exhibition catalogues. This includes working closely with the curators at Tate Modern on ‘Gilbert & George: Major Exhibition’ (2007) and writing essays for the forthcoming exhibitions in 2011: Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and William Etty: Art and Controversy at York Art Gallery.

Research group(s)

Collaborators

  • Dr Grace Brockington (University of Bristol)
    Developing a long-term interdisciplinary research network on the theme of 'Internationalism and Cultural Exchange', a project currently supported by the Worldwide Universities Network.
  • Dr Christopher Scheer (University of Utah)
    Professor Rachel Cowgill (Liverpool Hope University)
    Dr James Mansell (University of Nottingham)
    Helena Capkova (University of the Arts, London)
    Collaborating on an interdisciplinary and international colloquium, ‘Enchanting Modernity: Theosophy and the Arts in the Making of Early Twentieth-Century Culture’, on 3rd December 2010. Application for an International Network grant on this topic submitted to the Leverhulme Trust in July 2011.
  • Professor Mark Hallett
    Dr Martina Droth (Yale Center for British Art)
    Dr Matthew Hargreaves (Yale Center for British Art)
    Collaborating on a series of postgraduate workshops in Yale and York (the first of which was held in June 2011) and a web-based research project entitled 'Making Art, Picturing Practice: the Artist's Studio c. 1700-1900' (MAPP). The next workshop will be held in York in July 2012.

Supervision

In progress

  • Sean Willcock
    The Indian 'Mutiny': Visual Culture and the Coverage of Colonisation, 1857-1870
  • Dorothy Nott
    The development of realism in war art from the Crimean War to the outbreak of the First World War
  • Emma Watts (co-supervised with Amanda Lillie)
    British Art- Exhibition and Reception in late 19th Century Australia
  • Jung Gyan Chae (MPhil, co-supervised with Michael White)
    Influence of Asian art on Abstract Expressionism in America since 1938
Sarah is particularly interested in hearing from students who would like to pursue doctoral research in the fields of British art, art and visual culture within the British Empire and sculpture in the twentieth century.

Publications

Selected publications

  • 'Intimacy and Distance: Physicality, Race and Paint in Etty's "The Wrestlers", in Sarah Burnage, Mark Hallett and Laura Turner (eds), William Etty: Art & Controversy (London: Philip Wilson Publishers in association with York Museums Trust, 2011), pp. 75-90
  • 'Sex, Stone and Empire: Direct Carving and "British" Sculpture', in Modern British Sculpture (London: Royal Academy, 2011), pp. 100-105
  • 'Modernism and the Visual Arts', in Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Parsons and Andrew Thacker (eds), Modernisms Handbook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) pp.540-561
  • 'The "essential quality of things": E.B. Havell, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Indian Sculpture in Britain', commissioned for special issue on 'Nineteenth-Century Sculpture in its Global Contexts', edited by Jason Edwards and Michael Hatt, Journal of Visual Culture in Britain (Autumn, 2010) pp. 239-264
  • 'Walter Crane and Hermann Obrist: craft, sculpture and transnationality at the fin de siècle', Henry Moore Institute Online Papers and Proceedings
  • 'Review of Modern Sculpture Reader (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2007)', Journal of Visual Culture in Britain, vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 2008), pp.134-141
  • Gilbert & George: Major Exhibition (London: Tate, 2007), author and editor of bibliography, biography and other endmatter for the Tate catalogue, pp. 198-208

Teaching

Undergraduate

  • Art in America, c. 1800-1913
  • Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris
  • Global Encounters: Art, visual culture and the British Empire, c. 1850-1920
  • Victorian Art
  • Modernisms

Postgraduate

  • Contact Zones: Art and Empire
  • MA Core Course in Research Methods
Sarah's students in London

External activities

Memberships

Editorial duties

Invited talks and conferences

  • Monuments, manufacture and movement: plaster casting, photography and the colonial museum
    York/Delhi collaborative workshop, University of Delhi (April 2012)
  • 'What is to become of the Crystal Palace?': the Crystal Palace after 1851
    Co-organiser, interdisciplinary workshop (June 2011) 
  • Horace Brodzky on Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
    Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: Texts and Testimonies, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (June 2011)
  • Invited instructor on the Yale Center for British Art's graduate summer seminar, Yale University
     'Making Art, Picturing Practice: The Artist's Studio in Britain, ca. 1700–1900' (June 2011)
  • The Casting of South Asia
    Plaster Casts at South Kensington: reproducing art in the 19th century, Victoria & Albert Museum (20 May 2011)
  • Ezra Pound's new 'order' of artists: 'The New Sculpture' (1914) and the sculptural avant-garde in early twentieth-century Britain
    The New British Sculpture: Reviewing the persistence of an idea, c.1850 – present, Henry Moore Institute (17-18 February 2011)
  • Enchanting modernity: Theosophy and the Arts in the Making of Early Twentieth-Century Culture
    Co-organiser (3 December 2010)
  • Nations in the History of Art
    Co-organiser, an interdisciplinary and international workshop, University of Toronto (1-3 October 2010)
  • 'Highly Charged Lines': Representations of South Asia in Edwardian London
    Bharat Britain: South Asians Making Britain 1870-1950 conference, plenary speaker, British Library (13-14 September 2010)
  • Island Nation, Imperial City: London, art and empire c.1890-1914
    Sites of Internationalism at the Fin de Siècle: Between Metropolis and Cosmopolis, Northumbria University (9 September 2010)
  • Walter Crane: craft, sculpture and transnationality at the fin de siècle
    Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (16 June 2010)
  • Underneath the Arches: Gilbert & George, Sculpture and Home/-lessness
    New Approaches to British Art, 1939-1969, Courtauld Institute of Art, London (4-5 June 210)
  • A "new order of things": Ananda Coomaraswamy, the India Society and the networks colonial modernity in Britain, c.1910-1914
    'Ananda Coomaraswamy's Influence on Modern Art' session, College Art Association Conference, Chicago (10-13 February 2010)
  • The poetics of permanence: poetry, carving and letter-cutting in the 20th century
    'The Plastic Expression the Fruitful Sphere': European Poets and Sculptors in the 20th Century conference, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (20 November, 2009)
  • The India Society and inter-colonial artistic networks at the beginning of the 20th Century
    Representations workshop, part of the Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950 project (21 October 2009)
  • A "world-wide exchange of art-powers": Orpheus, the Theosophical Art Circle and intercolonial cultural networks, ca.1907-1914
    Modernism, Cultural Exchange and Transnationality conference of the Modernist Magazines Project, University of Sussex (15-17 July, 2009)
  • Crossings and Transgressions: Exploring Internationalism and Interdisciplinarity (workshop)
    Co-organiser with Dr. Grace Brockington (University of Bristol), at University of Bristol. Second interdisciplinary event in establishing a Research Network on the theme of 'Internationalism and Cultural Exchange, 1870-1920' (9 July 2009)
  • Exploring Transnationalism and Art History (workshop)
    Co-organiser with Dr. Grace Brockington (University of Bristol), held at the University of York, funded by the Centre for Modern Studies and the Department of History of Art, University of York and the University of Bristol (30 January 2009)
  • Walter Crane and the Festival of Empire in 1911
    Envisioning Utopia: The Urban and Pastoral in British Art and Socialist Politics, 1870-1900, Walter Crane Study Day at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (4 December, 2008)
 
Sarah Victoria Turner

Contact details

Dr Sarah Victoria Turner
Lecturer
Department of History of Art
Room V/133

Tel: 01904 324621

Office hours: 

Please contact Sarah by email