Small projects

Two starting points: an architecture education history of York, 1950-2025

In 2025, York University will receive its first students at the School of Architecture. However, it is not the first architecture school York ever had. The Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies (IAAS) was established by the university in the 1950s and grew rapidly with its teaching, research, and design practice before it was shut down in the 1990s.

What were the merits of its teaching in terms of the diversity of architecture education approaches, the proliferation of practices, and their relationship to the unique city of York? The project will investigate these questions by bringing staff from relevant departments in the University of York and the architecture industry for discussion, along with an archive study through the surviving bulletins, correspondence, and press clips, revealing the significant stories, to serve as inspiration for the upcoming school.

Readymade, Objects and Assemblages

This project aims to offer a series of lectures during the academic year 2024/2025 on the Readymades and Assemblages created in the Avant-Garde. By focusing on the object's nature and materiality, a diversity of study approaches can be unfolded.

This is visible, for example, in the recent publication 'Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde' (2023), edited by David Hopkins and Disa Persson, which offered a multidisciplinary and original perspective on well-known artworks through the lenses of hygiene and health issues. The author and co-editor of this volume, Professor David Hopkins (University of Glasgow), will be offered the opportunity to give the first talk related to his last research in this book. 

Art and Anticapitalism

To further explore the links between recent art and exhibition making centred on ideas of anticapitalism. This builds on from research on 20th century independence era movements in Southeast Asia, including the Bandung 1955 Asia Africa Conference as one of the world's first instances towards political decoloniality.

Building on from this historical period brings to question what is the new international solidarity movement in the contemporary era centred around? While recent contemporary art aims towards destabilising categorisations of ethnicity and nation, looking at capitalist structures of production and circulation as sites of intervention and critique seem to be the preoccupation with many contemporary artists - particularly from the Global South - today. 

Victorian Expansions Conference

A one-day conference (21 February 2025, The Treehouse) with national and international speakers whose research diversifies and decolonises Victorian studies, by pushing against its geographical (beyond the British Isles), chronological, and disciplinary boundaries.

The Victorian era witnessed the emergence of eclectic literary, artistic, and musical forms and genres that belie the myth of “splendid isolation,” by highlighting colonial, European, and transatlantic engagements, and cutting across Romantic, Victorian, and Modern/ist periodisations. By gathering interdisciplinary research by postgraduate students and senior scholars, “Victorian Expansions” will uncover the inherent diversity and expand the scope of what we think of as Victorian, and indeed British, culture and identity.