Sir William Dobell Chair and Fellows for 2025 announced

In 2023 the Centre for Art History and Art Theory in the ANU School of Art & Design established a new fellowship scheme to increase the impact of the Dobell endowment to support the research of art historians and curators at all stages of their careers. Each year one position known as the Sir William Dobell Visiting Chair and up to four positions known as the Sir William Dobell Visiting Fellow are awarded.

We are excited to announce the Sir William Dobell Chair and Fellows for 2025.

CHAIR

Anthony Gardner
University of Oxford

Anthony Gardner is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Oxford, where he was the Head of the Ruskin School of Art from 2017 to 2020 and is currently the Director of Graduate Studies. He has published widely on subjects including postcolonialism, postsocialism and curatorial histories, with articles in On Curating, ARTMargins, Third Text, Postcolonial Studies and many other journals and anthologies. From 2012 to 2021, he was an editor of the MIT Press journal ARTMargins, for which he continues to serve as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board. Among his books are Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (Melbourne, 2013), Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015) and, also through MIT Press in 2015, the anthology Neue Slowenische Kunst: From Kapital to Capital (with Zdenka Badovinac and Eda Čufer). In 2016, he co-authored (with Charles Green, University of Melbourne) Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art, published by Wiley-Blackwell. He is currently developing two new projects: a study  of contemporary art and exhibitions in our age of perpetual distraction; and an exploration of critical curatorial histories from the 1950s to the present. 

Project title: Art in an Age of Perpetual Distraction 

Abstract: We live in an age of perpetual distraction. From our compulsions for social media, to the algorithmic marketing that seeks to lure our focus from website to website and product to product, to the pervasiveness of mobile technologies and rapid composition that bombard us with images at home, on the streets, and in our places of study and work – all these demands for our attention are transforming how we concentrate, how we process information, and how we engage with the world around us. Given our visual and sensory media are the primary means by which this global social change is happening, can we look to artists and artworks for other ways to use those media and thus to imagine distraction otherwise? Could distraction be a means to ignite other frameworks that are central to arts and the humanities – such as curiosity, empathy, resistance, or pedagogy – that also hinge on connection differently from the apathy, entropy, and ailment with which distraction is usually associated? These questions underpin my research undertaken as the Dobell Visiting Chair, which will include a day-long symposium and workshops at ANU with artists, curators and students working with and from modes of distraction today. 

FELLOWS

Jamie Jelinski
University of Toronto

Jamie Jelinski is a cross-disciplinary scholar of visual culture, most recently in the context of tattooing and images related to crime. He received his PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History at University of Toronto. Previously, he held an Izaak Walton Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of History at Dalhousie University and a Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Jelinski has been a Visiting Scholar at NSCAD University and Queen’s University Belfast. Jelinski’s first book, Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in June 2024. He is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled Unseen Images: Crime, Access to Information, and Visual Culture, which is under contract with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. In addition, he is in the early stages of two projects: one involving the production and collection of images by Dr. Wilfrid Derome, the founder of Quebec’s forensic crime laboratory, and another focused on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s creation of facial composites from the 1950s onward. 

Project title: Causes Célèbres: Criminology, Forensic Science, and the Visual Culture of Dr. Wilfrid Derome  

Abstract: Causes Célèbres: Criminology, Forensic Science, and the Visual Culture of Dr. Wilfrid Derome explores the transnational precedents and influences on the use of images at North America’s first forensic crime laboratory, which opened in Montreal in 1914. By investigating international relationships in the fields of medicine, law enforcement, and science, I open new insights into how knowledge production within and between these areas of inquiry played out through the production, dissemination, and display of visual culture. The laboratory’s director was Wilfrid Derome, who had practiced medicine in Montreal since the early 1900s and trained in forensics at the University of Paris in 1909. After the laboratory was inaugurated, Derome became a leading figure in the investigation of violent crime, not only in Quebec, but in Canada more widely. Previous state-sponsored writing has uncritically valorized him using a psycho-biographical approach, which my study critically reappraises while considering how the production, collection, display, and dissemination of images was, as I argue, central to his work. I assess how the visual culture Derome produced and engaged with was embedded within wider transnational systems of modern knowledge production and image creation in law enforcement, forensic science, and criminology between Canada, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. These images were not art objects, but I consider their aesthetic qualities alongside the circumstances of their creation and circulation within the overlapping medical, scientific, and legal communities.  

Tets Kimura
Flinders University

Tets Kimura completed his PhD on Japanese fashion and soft power at Flinders University in 2019, where he holds an affiliated academic status to conduct research. Rewriting his doctoral thesis, Fashion, Soft Power and Cultural Diplomacy: A Case Study of Japanese Fashion in Australia is set to be published in 2026 by Bloomsbury. This book project is supported by the 2024 Australian Academy of the Humanities’ Publication Subsidy Scheme, and International Australian Studies Association’s ECR Publishing Subsidy Scheme.  His research interests focus around two main fields; fashion studies and Australia-Japan relations, which is reflected in his forthcoming Sir William Dobell Visiting Fellowship at the ANU’s School of Art & Design. He undertook three renowned fellowships: Japan Foundation’s Japanese Studies Fellowship (2021-22), National Library of Australia Fellowship (2023-24), and Taiwan’s Ministry of Education’s postdoctoral fellowship at the National Chengchi University in Taipei (2024).   His latest publications include “Self-translation, Rewriting, and Translingual Address: Li Kotomi’s Solo Dance” (Journal of Literary Multilingualism, 2024, co-author Yahia Ma), “Memories and Displays of Japan's Early Industrialisation through the Production of Silk” (Routledge Handbook of Trauma in East Asia, 2023), and “Repatriated from Home as Enemy Aliens: Forgotten Lived Experiences of Japanese-Australians during the Second World War” (Journal of Australian Studies, 2023).  

Project title: Japanese Perceptions of Australian wool and its images

Abstract: This research involves the collection and analysis of Japanese language materials uniquely kept at the ANU’s Menzies Library, to reveal what kinds of images associated with Australian wool were created in Japan, and how Australian wool was used by in Japanese fashion scenes since Japan started importing Australian wool in 1890 through to the Second World War when Australia and Japan were enemies, and then into the post-war recovery of Australia-Japan relations based on neutral respect, symbolised by the enforcement of the Basic Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between Australia and Japan (1976). During this 86-year period (1890-1976), wool trade, consumption of wool, and images associated with wool have contributed to the formation of influential relationships, supported the development and maintenance of bilateral relations, even though it was tested by the war. The findings are expected to describe how fashion materials such as wool have served as an important but unacknowledged instrument of Australian cultural diplomacy with Japan. Furthermore, combining the fellow’s 2023 publication on Japan’s historical silk productions, this research will further establish a link between Australia and Japan by showcasing the similar roles Australian wool and Japan silk have had on the national imaginary. Each is iconic to each nation, and national images were generated around these raw fashion materials. Thus, this project will demonstrate the impact of fashion on nationhood building and national identity in ways the go beyond conventionally discussed individual aesthetics and manners of presentation.  

Roger Nelson
Nanyang Technological University

Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, whose research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia. His current book project examines “artistic art histories” across the region and its diasporas. He is Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Previously, he was Curator at National Gallery Singapore, and Adjunct Lecturer of Art History at the National University of Singapore. Roger is the 2022 recipient of the A.L. Becker Southeast Asian Literature in Translation Prize, awarded by Association for Asian Studies. He is co-editor of I Am An Artist (He Said) (National Gallery Singapore, 2022), the first book-length translation of writing by artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. He is also author of Modern Art of Southeast Asia: Introductions from A to Z (National Gallery Singapore, 2019). Roger’s writing has appeared in publications including ARTMargins, Oxford Art Journal, Art Journal, World Art, Artforum, and positions: asia critique (forthcoming), and in books including The Routledge Companion to Literature and Art (2024). He is also co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia (NUS Press), the only peer-reviewed scholarly journal dedicated to art of Southeast Asia.  

Project title: Artistic Art Histories (in Southeast Asia) 

Abstract: During my fellowship, my research will centre on artistic art histories: the practices of contemporary artists who conduct art-historical research and deal with ideas and information from art histories within their artworks, across a diverse range of media. I have developed the concept of artistic art histories as a counterpart to the more familiar notion of artistic research in order to foreground the thinking and theorising that occurs within these practices. I consider this enabling and enacting of knowledge within contemporary artistic practices to be significant, particularly in the context of the ongoing project of decolonising art-historical work. While I see artistic art histories proliferating globally—this is a major, if largely unrecognized, current in contemporary art globally—these practices take on special significance in parts of the world where the academic discipline of Art History is more recent or nascent, or where the works of (post)colonial modernist artists have been under-studied and under-appreciated. This includes Southeast Asia. 

My research focuses on contemporary and modern art in Southeast Asia, including in the region’s diasporas, yet I also seek to deprovincialise this art and its histories, and to theorise from and with practices related to this region. I propose deprovincialising the art and art histories of Southeast Asia (and other regions across the Global South) as a next step after the irreversible (if incomplete) task of ‘provincializing Europe’ and the North and the West.  

Anna Parlane
Monash University

Anna Parlane is Lecturer, Art History and Theory, at Monash University. Her research area spans contemporary New Zealand and Australian art, and she has always been interested in how unconventional or marginalised worldviews can be expressed through art practice. Her writing on Michael Stevenson’s exhibition Disproof Does Not Equal Disbelief (2021) at KW, Berlin, was published by KW and Sternberg Press. Anna is a founding board member and regular contributor to Memo Review and has published in peer-reviewed and industry publications including the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Index Journal, Burlington Contemporary, The Journal of New Zealand Studies, Discipline, Reading Room and Art in Australia.

Project title: Alternative facts: Strategies of generative misinterpretation in art of the 1990s 
 
Abstract: This project is a comparative study of works made in Australia during the 1990s by Aotearoa New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson and the art-music collective Slave Pianos, and neo-avant-garde works in the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) collection. Focusing on an artistic methodology of generative misinterpretation, the project will trace the artistic and musical precedents of this approach as well its contemporary associations. The NGA’s collection of works by Fluxus artists as well as scores by experimental composers like John Cage were largely acquired during the 1980s and 90s. The work of the Slave Pianos collective explicitly drew from the example of Fluxus, and can also be understood as a response to the rapid canonisation and museum acquisition of neo-avant-garde art during this period. To what extent can art objects be considered scores for experiences, as in the work of Fluxus artists? How does museum acquisition impact the reception of such works? At what point does interpretation cross over into misinterpretation, and can an art object support an alternative set of facts? The project will also consider artistic practices of reproduction and misinterpretation within the context of political misinformation, situating artworks within a 1990s post-Cold War climate of paranoia and also re-examining them in light of the recent rise of conspiracy theories in contemporary politics. 
 

The Sir William Dobell Art Foundation was formed in 1971 in memory of the Archibald prize-winning Australian artist Sir William Dobell (1899-1970), who was known for his landscapes and portrait paintings. The Foundation established the Sir William Dobell Chair of Art History at ANU, which it has continued to support for 30 years. This position has helped the College of Arts and Social Sciences support a teacher and researcher and strengthened the university's position as a leader in art history and curatorial studies.

This article was originally published by the ANU School of Art & Design, here.