New Appointments
We are delighted to announce that two new staff members will be joining the School of Art History and Cultural Policy from January 2020. Dr Victoria Durrer and Dr Sean Leatherbury have been selected as Ad Astra Fellows following a very competitive process, as part of UCD's major staff expansion programme: http://www.ucd.ie/adastrafellows/.
Dr Victoria Durrer is a specialist in cultural policy and arts management, whose collaborative research focuses on how individuals, groups and cultural forms are included and / or excluded in the practices and policies of international, national and local cultural institutions, government and quasi-state bodies. Dr Durrer is co-founder of (opens in a new window)Brokering Intercultural Exchange, an international research network on arts and cultural management, and the all-island research network, (opens in a new window)Cultural Policy Observatory Ireland. With publications in a number of books and academic journals and a commitment to publicly-engaged research, her work has been significant in raising the profile of Irish cultural policy studies both home and abroad. She is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy and an editor of the (opens in a new window)Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy. Her most recent publication, (opens in a new window)Managing Culture: Reflecting on Exchange in Global Times is due out in the Palgrave Sociology of the Arts series. Dr Durrer is also co-Investigator of the AHRC-funded research project The Art of Reconciliation: Do reconciliation-funded arts projects transform conflict?. In addition to her academic expertise, Dr Durrer previously served as Youth Arts Co-ordinator for South Dublin County Council, as well as previous roles in community / arts management in Britain, the U.S., and China. She joins us from Queen’s University Belfast, where she is Senior Lecturer in Arts Management and Cultural Policy.
Dr Sean Leatherbury is an art historian whose research focuses on the art and architecture of the Roman and late antique Mediterranean, and his specialisations include the relationship between words and images; the so-called minor arts (glass, silver, textiles); cross-cultural and interfaith artistic exchange and engagement; and wall and floor mosaics, particularly in the region of modern-day Syria. His first monograph, (opens in a new window)Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity: Between Reading and Seeing (Routledge, 2019), considers the visual functions of texts inscribed within Christian, Jewish, and early Islamic buildings across the Mediterranean. His research has been supported by residential fellowships at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles, the Bard Graduate Center in New York, and the Council for British Research in the Levant, and by grants from the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the Association for the Study and Preservation of Roman Mosaics (ASPROM). Dr. Leatherbury is a Research Associate of the Monumental Art in the Christian and Early Islamic East project at Oxford, and mosaics curator of(opens in a new window) Manar al-Athar, an open-access multi-media resource for the study of the ancient and medieval Middle East. Dr Leatherbury joins us from Bowling Green State University, where he is assistant professor in art history.