Dr Jeremy Melius
Lecturer in Department History of Art

Profile

Biography

BA (Yale University), PhD (University of California, Berkeley)

Jeremy Melius joined the department in 2024 as a lecturer in British art. His research focuses on the modern period in a variety of national contexts, centering on British art and art criticism since the 1840s. His approach has often been framed by the complex entanglements of word and image, and their consequences for the treatment of works of art as forms of historical evidence.

His work has been supported by the Huntington Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, Villa I Tatti, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the Clark Art Institute, and eikones – Center for the Theory and History of Images at the University of Basel, among other institutions.

Research

Overview

Jeremy has published widely on figures such as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Pablo Picasso, and Lee Bontecou, and on topics such as the history of connoisseurship, the reception of Renaissance art, and the relation between photography and sculpture. A special focus of interest has been the history of anglophone art writing, with its strong, experimental approaches to questions of affect, ethics, environment, and empire, and to the pleasures and dangers of close description.

He is currently completing a book entitled The Invention of Botticelli, which reconsiders the artist’s ‘rediscovery’ during the nineteenth century and its consequences for the emergent discipline of art history, with its developing sense of art as an embodiment of the past. A second book project extends these concerns, focusing on the Victorian critic John Ruskin’s fraught relation to the past, present, and future of the historical interpretation of art. It aims to bring into focus what remains living in Ruskin’s complex thought, and to offer a new approach to the intensity of this critic’s attention to the visible world, the politics of artistic form, and the complexities of being close to works of visual art.

Another project addresses the ‘impersonal intimacy’ of later nineteenth-century art writing. It investigates the ways in which experimental practices of response and description undertaken by figures such as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, and Henry James came to imagine new modes of relation to other people and to the world.

Publications

Selected publications

• ‘Titian, Metaphor, and the Body’. I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 26.2. Special issue: Titian’s Poesie and their Afterlives, edited by Shawon Kinew and Felipe Pereda (Fall 2023).
• ‘“Fossil-creatures” and the “mockeries of life”’: Ruskin at Verona’. Sculpture Journal 32.2. 
• Special issue: Sculpture, Animacy, Petrification, edited by Ellery E. Foutch, Melissa Haynes, and Jessica Keating (June 2023): 233-249.
• ‘Ruskin’s Broken Middle’. nonsite 35. Special issue: The Nineteenth Century (Part Three) (Spring 2021).
• ‘Pater, Impressionism, and the Undoing of Sense’. In A Companion to Impressionism. Edited by André Dombrowksi. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021, pp. 93-106.
• ‘Forms of Intermediate Being’. In Ruskin’s Ecologies. Edited by Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes. London: Courtauld Books Online, 2021, pp. 163-183.
• ‘On “The Condition of Artistic Creation”’. Selva. A Journal of the History of Art. Issue zero (2019).
• ‘Botticelli, Pre-Raphaelitism, and the Task of the Translator’. In Melissa Buron et al, Truth and Beauty; The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum, 2018, pp. 126-134.
• ‘Sculpture from Behind’. In Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction. Edited by Sarah Hamill and Megan R. Luke. Los Angeles:The Getty Research Institute, 2017, pp. 67-80.
• ‘Picasso’s Survival (Femme se coiffant, 1940)’. In T. J. Clark, Anne Wagner, et al. Pity and Terror: Picasso’s Path to Guernica. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2017, pp. 162-173.
• ‘Living with the Void’. In Laura Stamps, Joan Banach, et al. Lee Bontecou. Cologne: Walther König, 2017, pp. 22-31.
• ‘Ruskin’s Copies’. Critical Inquiry 42.1 (Fall 2015): 61-96.
  ‘Inscription and Castration in Picasso’s The Painter and his Model 1927’. October 151 (Winter 2015): 43-61.
• ‘A Symposium on the St. Matthew Passion’. With contributions by T. J. Clark, Ethan Iverson, Hallie Sekoff, Lynn Glaser, Jeremy Melius, and Mark Padmore. The Threepenny Review 141 (Spring 2015): 18-20.
• ‘Guitar on a Table’, ‘Guitar’, and ‘Head of a Man’ (three essays). In Picasso: The Making of Cubism, 1912-1914. E-book edited by Blair Hartzell and Anne Umland with Scott Gerson. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014.
• ‘Connoisseurship, Painting, and Personhood’. Art History 34.2 (April 2011): 288-309. Reprinted in Creative Writing and Art History. Edited by Patricia Rubin and Catherine Grant. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012, pp. 66-87.

Teaching

Postgraduate

• Seeing Sculpture

External activities

Overview

Editorial Duties

• Editorial Board, Selva: A Journal of the History of Art (2019-present)

Conferences Organized

• Description and the Art of Response, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, co-organized with Nicholas Gaskill, David Russell, and Esther Osorio Whewall; speakers including T. J. Clark, Jeff Dolven, Kathryn Murphy, Adam Phillips, and Elisa Tamarkin (June 2022)
• Study Day on John Ruskin, The Drawing Institute, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, organized for the Historians of British Art (February 2019)
• Freud’s Architecture, Center for the Humanities, Tufts University, speakers including Diane O’Donoghue and Spyros Papapetros (May 2015)
• Does History Still Matter? The Research and Academic Program at The Clark Art Institute, co-organized with Felipe Pereda; speakers including Caroline Arscott, Whitney Davis, Aden Kumler, Michele Matteini, Stephen Melville, David Nirenberg, Margaret Olin, Spyros Papapetros, Frederic Schwartz (February 2015)
• Animations: Image, Movement, Affect, Center for the Humanities, Tufts University, co-organized with Margaret Ingrid Christian; speakers including Megan R. Luke, John MacKay, Philip Rosen, and Rahel Villinger (April 2014)

Invited Lecture Series

•  ‘Ruskin’s Histories’. The Tomás Harris Lectures, Department of History of Art, University College London (October 2018).

Recent Invited Lectures and Presentations (selected)

• ‘Ruskin’s Doubles’. British Art 1750-1919: Reflections and Futures, Research and Academic Program of The Clark Art Institute (November 2023)
• ‘Ruskin Unpossessed’. The Clark Art Institute (December 2022); Earlier version delivered as the Richard McDougall Lecture on British Watercolour, The Courtauld Institute of Art
• ‘Ruskin’s Touch’. John Ruskin: Prophet of the Anthropocene, John C. Reily Center, University of Notre Dame (February 2020)
• ‘Gothic Hearts’. ‘A Single Drop of Ink for a Mirror’: Nineteenth-Century Literature and the Visual Arts, Princeton University (October 2019)
• ‘Ruskin and the Art of Relations’. Keynote for Ruskin’s Ecology, The Ruskin Museum & Research Centre, University of Lancaster (February 2019); earlier version delivered as Dickinson Lecture, Department of Art History, Pennsylvania State University
• ‘Fretwork Still’. Ruskin at 200, Corpus Christi College, Oxford (January 2019)
• ‘Nauman’s Skin’. Sarah Lawrence College (December 2018)
• ‘Proust’s Attention, Ruskin’s Touch’. Department of Romance Languages, University of Oregon (April 2018)
• ‘Idolatrous Ruskin’. Smart Lecture Series, Department of Art History, University of Chicago (March 2018)
• ‘Pissarro and the Disclosures of Landscape’. Chicago Object Studies Initiative, Art Institute of Chicago / Department of Art History, University of Chicago (March 2018)
• ‘Schlosser’s Photographic Histories’. Visual History: The Past in Pictures, University of Southern California (April 2017)
• ‘Rachel Harrison’s Voyage of the Beagle, 2007’. Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017)

Recent Conference Participation (selected)

• ‘Ruskin, Armstrong, and the Force of the Grotesque’. Collaborative paper with David Russell, Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry at Thirty, North American Victorian Studies Association (November 2023)
• ‘Vivisection and the Visual Arts’. British Art and Natural Forces, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (October 2020)
• ‘Art History and the Order of Names’. Radical Art Histories and Futures, annual meeting of the College Art Association (February 2020)
• ‘Gothic and Anti-Gothic in Ruskin’s Renaissance’. The Gothic Present and Renaissance Art, Renaissance Society of America (2017)