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 am fascinated by the ways in which images 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 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. I currently have several strands of research relating to the 18th century: a book-project, which is almost completed, about national identity and graphic satire, examining the pivotal role that William Hogarth played in the development of a modern, pictorial satire of the French; a second 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. An emerging project which starts in the 18th century and moves forward investigates the role of ruins and memorialisation in different forms of landscape art.
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 and Digital Cultures. Our teaching groups are small and we use our central location to offer students hands-on learning experiences, working with and alongside professionals in London’s art world. 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
Level 4: Art & Design Directed Study: Portraits to Selfies
Level 5: Art & Design Directed Study: Art, Creativity and Business
Level 5: Francophone Cultures in London
Level 6: The Elegiac Landscape
Level 6: Art History Dissertation