About Dr Kate Grandjouan
Dr Kate Grandjouan is Associate Professor of Art History and Associate Director for DEI in the Humanities. She joined Northeastern University London in 2019 having lectured at the Courtauld and at the Institute of Continuing Education (University of Cambridge). She gained her PhD at the Courtauld where she continues to lecture occasionally on the Short Courses programme. Kate specialises in the visual and material cultures of the eighteenth century. Her post-doctoral research has been supported by the University of Yale (The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Lewis Walpole Library) and published internationally. At Northeastern, London Kate’s teaches art history courses on the undergraduate programme that span the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Topics include print culture, portraiture and landscape, theories and methods of art history and modernism in art and design. Kate also supervises final-year dissertations on a variety of early modern and modern topics. In 2023, she won the Dean’s Prize for Teaching Excellence.
Email: kate.grandjouan@nulondon.ac.uk
Qualifications
PhD in Art History, The Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), UK
MA in Art History & Archaeology, University of Maryland, MD, USA
Maîtrise de Littérature française, Université de Paris IV, (La Sorbonne), France.
BA (Combined Hons) in French and History of Art, University of Kent, UK
Academic Honours
2017: Visiting Scholar, Lewis Walpole Library (Yale University), Farmington,
Connecticut, USA
2011: Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art,
London, UK
Selected Publications
2024: ‘Virtual Witnessing in ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ (1732): Hogarth’s visio-crime media’ for a special edition on ‘William Hogarth et le cinéma’, ‘Écrans’ 2, No. 20, 2024. Paris, Classiques Garnier.
2022: ‘Aesop, intermediality and graphic satire c.1740’ in ‘Changing Satire: Transformations and Continuities in Europe 1600 – 1830’, edited by Cecilia Rosengren, Per Sivefors and Rikard Wingård (chapter in book) with Manchester University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2gvdmgw
2020: ‘Refugees, Patriotism and Hogarth’s The Gate of Calais (1748)’ in Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, pp. 287-303, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1111/sena.12336
2019: ‘La caricature et la « déqualification » de l’art: le cas de Henry Bunbury (1750-1810) et de Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827)’ (18 pages) in Satire Visuelle (ed.) Laurent Baridon, Frédérique Desbussions et Dominic Hardy published by INHA, Paris (National Insitute for History of Art) see
https://journals.openedition.org/inha/7923
2019: ’Parce que les Français, comme la mer, sont sans cesse en mouvement: satires anglaises sur l’inconstance des Français’ (19 pages) Le Siècle de la Légèreté: Emergences d’un paradigme du XVIIIe siècle français for Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment edited by Marine Ganofsky (University of Edinburgh) and Jean-Alexandre Perras see https://www.fabula.org/actualites/m-ganofsky-and-j-perras-dir-le-siecle-de-la-legerete-emergences-d-un-paradigme-du-xviiie-siecle_90468.php
2016: ’Super-size caricature: Thomas Rowlandson’s ‘Place des Victoires’ at the Society of Artists in 1783’ with British Art Studies Volume 4, an online, open access and peer-reviewed journal published by The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, see: http://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-4
Selected Presentations
March 2024: ‘The Elegiac Landscape: Rome in British Art 1750-1830’ at the Courtauld, London for the Showcasing Art History series on ‘Antiquity, Taste and the Self: Revisiting the Grand Tour: Revisiting the Discoveries of the Grand Tour’
February, 2021: for the 94th meeting of the Ottoline Club at Northeastern University London a research paper called: ‘Creative Synergies: British Newsprint and Satirical Media, c.1740.’
September 2020: Invited speaker for the conference ‘Prints in their Place: New Research on Printed Images in their Places of Production, Sale and Use’ organised by Harvard University and the Courtauld but cancelled due to Covid. The call for papers is here: https://emworkshop.fas.harvard.edu/node/1472257
November 2019: invited speaker at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London: ’Moral Geography in Marriage à la Mode: Hogarth’s Dirty French’, International conference coinciding with the Hogarth: Place and Progress exhibition at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
October 2019: BBC, London for ‘Start the Week’ with Andrew Marr to discuss the William Hogarth exhibition at the Sir John Soane’s Museum: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009r4j
January 2019: Courtauld, London: ‘James Thornhill and his contemporaries’, public lecture for the 13th season of the ‘Showcasing Art History Lecture Series’ organised by the Public Programmes department. The theme was Britain in Europe – Encounters in Art: 18th century to 2018
Dr Kate Grandjouan's Research
As an historian of British art, I am particularly interested in the period c.1660-1830. I specialise in the graphic arts and over the past couple of years I have published articles on caricature and graphic satire with Manchester University Press, Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment, British Art Studies and in Paris with the Institut National d’histoire de l’art (INHA) and with Gallimard. I currently have several strands of research. The first relates to a book-project provisionally entitled ‘Hogarth’s French’ which examines the pivotal role that William Hogarth played in the development of a satirical iconography for the French. An emerging strand of research is concerned with visual criminology and its origins in 18th-century Britain, when printed images started to be used in courts of law as types of evidence. More recently, I have become interested in ruin culture and memorialisation in landscape depictions. I love images and I am fascinated by the ways in which they participate in the production and transmission of knowledge, particularly in early modern societies when sophisticated techniques of visualisation were being developed. Prints, in particular, started to reach exceptional standards of empirical representation, creating “reality effects” that were distinctly new. This sense of the printed image having an evidentiary value is what interests me at the moment in relation to prints of people and places. In early modern society, printed images were powerful tools: they were capable of affirming and undermining social and political identities and serving as vectors for national and cultural myths.
At Northeastern London we teach art history as an inter-disciplinary subject. We sit within the Humanities so we work closely with colleagues in English, Philosophy and History, but we also collaborate with faculty teaching Architecture and Design. Our teaching groups are small and this makes learning art history conversational. Like many others, I am convinced that teaching art history facilitates empathy in that it can give us the ability to understand each other better.
Dr Kate Grandjouan's Teaching
BA2: ‘French Painting from Chardin to Matisse’ which provides a wide-ranging introduction to European painting between c.1700 and 1930, focusing on the major ‘isms’ of the period and paying particular attention to the political and social conditions within which art was produced.
BA2: ‘Theory & Methodology for Art History’: which introduces students to key thinkers and the theoretical writings that have become central to the practice of art history.
BA3: ‘The Elegiac Landscape’ where we study the aesthetics of decay and destruction, against the backdrop of Empire and Enlightenment, romantic literature and philosophy, as well as the nationalist struggles that resulted in modern warfare. A wide range of visual media is discussed, ranging from the prints of Piranesi and the paintings of Hubert Robert to the films of Alexandre Sokurov and Terence Mallick.
BA3: ‘Masters of America’ which tracks the development of American art from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century following the interactions and synergies between American and European art worlds.
BA3 ‘Modern Art & Architecture Part 1’ offering a survey of the major shifts in painting and design from 1850-1920
Student dissertations supervised by Dr Kate Grandjouan:
A comparison of the representation of mourning in Jacques-Louis David’s paintings Andromache mourning Hector (1783) and The Death of Marat (1793)
The Female Nude as a ‘Prized Possession’: The Commodification of Amedeo Modigliani’s Female Nude Paintings from 1916-1917
‘Veterans’ and ‘Whores’ in Otto Dix’s Metropolis (1927-8): a private war memorial for the First World War
Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion (1938) as a transcultural work of Art
‘Picturesque Revival: Landscape, ruins and national identity in “The Picture Post”.