HIGHER EDUCATION COMMITTEE

Melissa Percival (Chair) | Professor, University of Exeter

I am an art historian specializing in eighteenth-century France and based at the University of Exeter.
In 2019 I joined the HEC as a committee member and in 2024 became its Chair. My role is to channel the wisdom and expertise of the HE art history community and help make the AAH a strong, supportive and outwardly-focused organisation. We run a programme of activities and events aimed at developing skills, creating resources and building community. I’m happy to be contacted about the committee’s work. Members serve for fixed terms so there are opportunities to
join.

m.h.percival@exeter.ac.uk

Maya Corry | Senior Lecturer, Oxford Brookes University

I teach the History of Art at Oxford Brookes. I work on Renaissance Italy, and the key themes of my research are gender, sexuality, the body and spirituality. Previously I taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Lincoln. Alongside my research and teaching I am active as a curator, including as lead co-curator of the Madonnas & Miracles exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

I work at the intersection of history and the history of art, using visual and material sources (images and objects) alongside written ones to explore the social, cultural and religious history of early modern Italy. I am particularly interested in interrelationships between practices and beliefs relating to the body, religion and spirituality, gender, sexuality, material culture and medicine in this period. For example, early modern attitudes to the body and its gendering were shaped by medical thinking, but also by the representation of the human form in images. Other research interests include childhood and adolescence, beauty and nascent concepts of race. My first book, which will be published with OUP, considers the development of a curiously androgynous ideal of beauty in the work of Leonardo da Vinci and artists working alongside him in Milan, and is titled: Beautiful Bodies: Sexuality, Spirituality and Gender in Leonardo’s Milan.

Rina Arya | Professor and Head of the School of Arts, University of Hull

Rina Arya is Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory and Head of the School of the Arts at
the University of Hull. Arya is widely recognised for her scholarship on the twentieth-century artist Francis Bacon, particularly focusing on existential symbols, embodiment, and the aesthetics of representation in Bacon’s work. Her 2012 monograph, Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World, was long-listed for the W. M. Berger Art History Prize. She further developed these interests in her 2014 book, Abjection and Representation, which examines themes of abjection and the body. Her research spans post-war British art, abjection and disgust, theology and visual art, the sociology of the sacred, and visual religious studies. Arya’s current projects include work on decolonising and cultural appropriation, as well as the cultural appropriation of Hindu symbols. She is also interested in the role of spirituality and the sacred in contemporary secular culture, often interrogating how art provokes reflection on deeper existential questions beyond traditional religious frameworks.

Catherine Grant | Reader and Dean for Education, Courtauld Institute for Art

I am an art historian specialising in contemporary art, with a focus on queer and feminist practices in Britain and North America. I have been a member of the HEC since 2024, and am particularly interested in creative and politically invested approaches to teaching students about art, archives and art historical writing. I am Vice-Dean for Education at the Courtauld, and work in close collaboration with
colleagues on curriculum design. I have taught across art, art history and the history of photography over the course of my academic career. I have a longstanding interest in teaching with grassroots and radical archives, and run the Animating Archives project with Dr Althea Greenan at the Women’s Art Library, and Prof Patrizia Di Bello at the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive.

Lydia Hamlett | Associate Professor, University of Cambridge and Fellow in History of Art, Murray Edwards College

I am an art historian specialising in long seventeenth-century art based at the University of Cambridge, and joined the HEC as a committee member in 2024. I work with university undergraduates at Murray Edwards College as well as in Continuing Education. My interest in the committee lies in widening access to Art History in HE and opening opportunities to study art at all stages of one’s life and career. I am currently involved in activities at the AAH that are based around teaching and assessment as well as engaging school teachers and pupils.  I am happy to be contacted about this work: lkh25@cam.ac.uk.

Sophie Kazan | Associate Adjunct Professor, University of Notre Dame (USA) London

I am an art historian whose research and teaching focuses primarily on art
and visual culture that extends beyond traditional Western canons. As an Associate Adjunct
Professor at the University of Notre Dame, USA’s London campus, I focus particularly on global,
diasporic and anti-colonial art history. An HEC committee member since 2024, I am proud to support
the hard work of the HE art history community and the AAH in inspiring both educators, art history students and prospective students in their practice and encouraging positive change. Together with colleagues on the HEC Committee from institutions around the UK, I support activities
and events aimed at developing resources and building consensus.

Smakhlo2@nd.edu

Claire Moran | Reader, Queen’s University Belfast

Claire Moran is Reader in French Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her research is broadly based
on 19th-century France and Belgium and many of her publications are in this area. Her publications
include articles on Courbet, Manet, Ensor, Redon and other 19th-c artists, the monograph Staging the Artist (Routledge, 2017), an edited volume Domestic Space in France and Belgium (Bloomsbury, 2022),
as well as two special issues on The Interior in Belgium and on Intimacy with the journal, Dix-Neuf (2019; 2021). She has recently published an article on Berthe Morisot and the plein-air interior with Nonsite and her monograph Morisot’s Modernism and Impressionist Art (Routledge) for which she was awarded the 2021 Society of French Studies Research Prize Fellowship is in press. She is a founding member of the Impressionist Futures Group.

Lara Pucci | Assistant Professor in Art History, University of Nottingham

After gaining a BA in History of Art and Italian at the University of Bristol, I moved to the Courtauld Institute of Art, where I completed an MA and PhD under the supervision of Professor Christopher Green. In 2007, I was Research Assistant for the exhibition Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910 at the National Gallery, London. Before joining the University of Nottingham in 2010, I was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies at the University of Manchester. In 2017-18, I was Henry Moore Foundation-British School at Rome Fellow in Sculpture.

Greg Salter | Lecturer in History of Art, University of Birmingham

I am an art historian specialising in art from Britain since 1945, with a particular focus on
sexuality, gender, and migration, and I work research and teaching in the Department of Art History, Curating, and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham. I published a book called Art And Masculinity In Post-War Britain: Reconstructing Home in 2019, and I am currently finishing a project on transnational histories of ‘queer’ art from Britain between the 1950s and the 1980s. I joined the HEC as a committee member in 2022. I have a particular interest in promoting the study of art history at university to students in comprehensive schools, and I am working with other members of the committee to develop resources that could be used by teachers in subjects at A-level to facilitate this.

Amy Tobin | Associate Professor in the History of Art, University of Cambridge and Curator, Contemporary Programmes, Kettle’s Yard

I currently hold a joint post at the University of Cambridge as professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History and Curator, contemporary programmes at Kettle’s Yard, the University’s Modern and Contemporary art gallery. I work on histories of art and feminism, as well as collectivity and collaboration in modern and contemporary art more broadly. I joined the HEC in 2019, when I began work on the committee’s Decolonising and Anti-racism initiatives, since then I’ve contributed to numerous programmes including our Authentic Assessment resources.

Joost Joustra | Research Fellow & Senior Lecturer, Department of Theology & Religious Studies, King’s College London

Joost Joustra grew up in the Netherlands and came to London to continue his education at the Courtauld Institute. In 2017, he completed his doctoral work with a thesis titled Pictorial Space and
Sacred Subject Matter in Florentine Painting, 1425–1466. Trained as a historian of Renaissance art,
his curatorial work at London’s National Gallery expanded his horizon, curating the exhibitions Sin (2020) and Saint Francis of Assisi (2023). His interests lie at the crossroads of the history of art, the history of Christianity, theology, and the history of ideas. He occasionally writes on modern and contemporary art. At King’s College London, he is the Department of Theology and Religious Studies’ art historian, and teaches on the MA in Theology, Bible, and the Arts, in collaboration with the National Gallery.

Jane works part-time.

Allan Madden | Lecturer in History of Art, University of Glasgow

Allan Madden is Lecturer in History of Art, teaching on a range of topics in modern and contemporary art. Allan has also supported the University of Glasgow’s Smithsonian Institution Strategic Partnership.  He completed his AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art on the topic ‘The Gallerist as Publisher: a critical history from 1900 to the present’. The thesis charted a critical history of publications produced by gallerists in Europe and North America from 1900 to the present, including livres d’artiste, exhibition catalogues, artists’ books and magazines. Previously, Allan completed his MLitt degree in ‘History of Art: Art: Politics: Transgression: Twentieth-Century Avant-Gardes’ at the University of Glasgow in 2011, where he produced his dissertation ‘Transgression at Home: Masculinity, Homosexuality and Domesticity in the work of Bacon and Hockney, 1953 – 1967’.

Prior to completing his PhD, Allan also worked in curation and exhibitions management at The Lighthouse, Scotland’s Centre for Design and Architecture, and the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, and continues to coordinate arts projects on a freelance basis. 

Allan is a member of the Dada and Surrealism Research Group and the SEXES Research Group at the Edinburgh College of Art.

Ceren Ozpinar | Senior Lecturer, University of Brighton

I am a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Brighton and
have served as Course Leader for the same degree programme since 2020. Having
been appointed to the Higher Education Committee since 2024, I have been particularly
involved in bolstering our efforts to promote decolonisation. Especially drawn to the AAH’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, an ethos I care deeply about, I have been a member since 2013, had the privilege of serving on the steering committee for the 2019 annual conference held at Brighton, and have been sitting on the editorial board of the AAH’s flagship journal Art History since the beginning of 2025.

Samuel Raybone | Lecturer in Art History and Director of Undergraduate Learning and Teaching, Aberystwyth University

I am an art historian specializing in Impressionism, based at Aberystwyth University. Since joining the HEC in 2022, I have focused on learning, teaching, and assessment. With HEC colleagues, I have organized and supported workshops on ‘Authentic Assessment’ and ‘Active Learning’ at the last two AAH Conferences, and authored an online toolkit on Authentic Assessment. I am committed to developing resources, sharing best practice, and connecting innovators teaching art history across UK HE. Please contact me at sar69@aber.ac.uk.

Amanda Sciampacone | Staff Tutor, Open University

Bio to follow.