Douglas Fordham

Professor, Department Chair, Art History

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Office hours: Monday 2:00-3:00pm Fayerweather 207

The History of Art, as it has taken shape over the past three centuries, has been profoundly shaped by legacies of empire and enlightenment. As a historian of art and the British empire, Douglas Fordham is interested in a wide array of visual art from the seventeenth century to the present in the Anglophone world. He is a co-editor with Tim Barringer and Geoff Quilley of Art and the British Empire (2007), which helped to place empire at the center of the study of British art. His first monograph, British Art and the Seven Years' War: Allegiance and Autonomy (2010) examined the relationship of imperial politics to artistic organization in eighteenth-century London. His second monograph, Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire (2019) considered how the newly discovered medium of aquatint printmaking conditioned the representation of cultures beyond Europe circa 1800. Douglas has worked with the Fralin Museum of Art and the Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Aboriginal Art on a number of exhibitions including Boomalli Prints & Paper: Making Space as an Art Collective (2022). Ongoing research includes graffiti in the print record, icons in the enlightenment, and indigenous printmaking. 

Douglas welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD students relating to any aspect of British art, the imperial world in which operated, and the indigenous artistic traditions that persisted within it.