Sir William Dobell Chair and Fellows for 2026 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 2026.

CHAIR

Anthea Callen 
University of Nottingham

Anthea Callen FRSA, Dip.AD, MA, PhD. Trained first as a painter, Anthea Callen is a world-renowned specialist in nineteenth-century French artists' materials and techniques, notably Impressionism & Post-Impressionism, contributing regularly as an art expert on BBC1’s 'Fake or Fortune?', in film and on radio. A committed feminist, Callen has a longstanding interest in gender and sexualities as constructed in visual representations of the human body; she uses interdisciplinary methods encompassing the arts, medico-surgical sciences and the social body-politic primarily in Western visual-material culture. In her latest Yale book Looking at Men (2018/2022) Callen deploys these tools to examine the male body, masculinities, sexualities and power in the long nineteenth century. Extending these interests, her Dobell Chair research project considers the racialised, classed and gendered body-politics circulating within the visual cultures of British Empire eugenics. 

Following her PhD (Courtauld Institute London), Callen’s academic career included the Universities of Warwick, De Montfort, Nottingham and ANU. Her research awards include four Leverhulme Fellowships, most recently an Emeritus Fellowship 2016-18. She is Professor Emeritus at both Nottingham and ANU, and now works freelance. Widely published, Callen is a frequent visiting professor, conference speaker and lecturer; she engages in collaborative research with conservation, museum and academic colleagues, including those at ANU/CAHAT.  

Project title: Circulating Empire Eugenics  

Abstract: My Dobell Chair research investigates the acquisition at the 1888 Paris Salon of François Sallé’s painting, The Anatomy Lesson at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, for the National Gallery of Australia, Sydney. A second bought from that same Salon was Gaston La Touche’s The First Born, a large canvas celebrating an idealised moment in working-class family life. My theory is that such paintings constitute the high-end of British imperialist propaganda, circulating civilising ideals of dominant white heterosexuality in the antipodes: Empire eugenics. What input did colonial Sydney have in these acquisitions – how were they received?   

Sallé’s painting landed in Sydney following its foundational School of Anatomy (legislated 1881). Previously, prospective surgeons travelled overseas to train, notably Edinburgh – as did New Zealand eugenicist Dr Frederic Truby King (1858-1938). Back in Dunedin in 1889, as Superintendent of Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, King brought his Parisian experience of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot’s notorious ‘Tuesday Lectures’, performed on ‘hypnotised’ hysterics. King’s further improvements to the ‘Dominion master race’ included, from 1905, his new ‘Mothercraft’ ventures: his Karitane Hospitals and ‘Plunkett Society’ nursery nurses. He exported these eugenicist initiatives to Australia and, full circle, King established the ‘Babies of the Empire Society’ (1917) in England – the ‘Mother Country’. 

FELLOWS

Kiki Rizky Soetisna Putri
Institut Teknologi Bandung

Kiki Rizky Soetisna Putri is a researcher and lecturer based in Bandung, Indonesia. She currently teaches at the Faculty of Art and Design, Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), and is the co-founder of the Center for Indonesian Visual Art Studies (CIVAS ITB), a center dedicated to preserving and studying archives related to the history of the Bandung School—an intellectual and artistic movement rooted in the Faculty of Art and Design, ITB. Kiki holds a PhD from the Graduate School of ITB. Her dissertation analyzed individual and collective practices that intersected with sociocultural issues in Bandung’s art scene after the 2000s. She is currently engaged in several research projects, including the reconstruction of the artistic practice and working process of the late female artist Umi Dachlan. Kiki now serves as the Principal Investigator of the multi-years research project Imagining Modernity: Colonial Archives and the Reimagination of Arts Pedagogy and Cultural Knowledge, funded by the Dutch Research Council under the NWA-Colonial Collections program. This project examines the epistemological legacies of colonial knowledge system embedded in art education, particularly through the study of Hindu-Buddhist objects relocated to ITB during the colonial and post-colonial periods.  In 2024, she was selected as one of the visiting scholars in the Faculty of Arts Indonesia Initiative at The University of Melbourne. 

Project title: Archiving the Bandung School: Pedagogy, Politics, and Postcolonial Knowledge-Making   

Abstract: This project explores the historical and epistemological legacy of the Bandung School—Indonesia’s first art school established in 1947, now the Faculty of Art and Design at Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB). Emerging in the aftermath of Japanese occupation and Indonesian independence, the Bandung School became central to shaping the nation’s modern art discourse. Yet, its close affiliation with Dutch educators and European pedagogical models prompted longstanding critiques, most notably Trisno Sumardjo’s 1954 polemic describing Bandung as a “Western laboratory.” Revisiting this metaphor within postcolonial and Cold War frameworks, this research examines how knowledge has been transferred, contested, and institutionalised under colonial, national, and geopolitical pressures. Through archival practice at Center for Indonesian Visual Art Studies and further comparative study at the Australian National University, the project aims to recontextualise Bandung’s modernist pedagogy within broader transnational debates on culture, art education and postcolonial modernity. Offering new insights into the entanglement between epistemologies, cultural politics, and the practice of care. 

Madeline Hewitson
University of Birmingham

Dr Madeline Hewitson is an art historian specialising in nineteenth-century British art. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research explores the intersections of art, empire, and religion, with particular expertise in Orientalism and the representation of the Hebrew Bible in Victorian art. 

Her work has been published in leading journals including Sculpture Journal, Journal of Victorian Culture, and British Art Studies. In 2023, she co-curated the exhibition ‘Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design’ at the Ashmolean Museum with Charlotte Ribeyrol and Matthew Winterbottom. Madeline’s research has been supported by major funders including the Leverhulme Trust, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the British Association for Victorian Studies.  

Project title: The First Covenant: Understanding the Role of the Hebrew Bible in Victorian Art 

Abstract: The First Covenant investigates how Victorian artists forged and disseminated religious art, through a renewed focus on the Hebrew Bible, as a framework for thinking about modernity, empire, and global identity. While British art history has often privileged Protestant and secular perspectives, this project demonstrates that Victorian artists turned to the Hebrew Bible to develop new visual languages that resonated across Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. 

The project examines a wide field of visual and material culture across the fine, graphic and decorative arts to reveal the saturation of biblical content. It focuses on the second half of the nineteenth century as a pivotal moment for a shift in thinking about the Hebrew Bible to a new awareness of its autonomous and influential role. This was a period of imperial expansion, the supposed emancipation of millions of enslaved people, near-constant warfare, and the forging of modern nation-states. While religious painting remained prominent within academic circles, artists increasingly turned to the Hebrew Bible to produce a reinvigorated interpretation of Scripture that reflected on British history, morality, and imperial identity. 

During her fellowship, Madeline will carry out research in Australian collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the State Library of Victoria. The fellowship will also support collaboration with Australian scholars and curators, laying the foundations for a monograph and an international exhibition on the art worker George Tinworth that re-positions Victorian biblical art within a global and interfaith context. 

Sary Zananiri
Monash University

Sary Zananiri is an artist, curator and cultural historian interested in the interaction between visual culture and transformations of identity in the modern Middle East. Zananiri’s forthcoming monograph, Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine (IB Tauris January 2026), looks at nationalist constructions of religion and masculinity in Palestine. He has co-edited three volumes with Karène Sanchez Summerer: Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens (Brill, 2021), European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine: Between Contention and Connection (Palgrave, 2021 and Revisiting Palestine Illustrated (AUP, forthcoming 2026).   

Recent exhibitions include Alta Forma (2025), the Qattan Foundation (2023), University of Groningen Library (2023), INALCO (June-July 2022), the Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival, Tunis (September 2022), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (December 2021-February 2022), the National Glass Museum, Wagga Wagga (July-November 2021), Rijksmuseum Oudheden, Leiden (May-October 2020) and Der Haus Der Kunst der Welt for ALMS, Berlin (June 2019). 

Zananiri was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the NWO project CrossRoads: European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine 1918-1948 and NINO at Leiden University and an Honorary Fellow of the AAIA.  They are a senior lecturer at Monash Art, Design and Architecture.  

Project title: Shaping Perceptions: Cultural Diplomacy and the Untold Palestinian Art History of Australia  

Abstract: This project investigates how Palestinian cultural diplomacy has shaped Australian perceptions of Palestine through visual culture from the 1940s to the early 2000s. Through a combination of archival and art-historical research in several Canberra collections, it will be the first study to map the cultural and artistic exchanges linking Australia and Palestine. The project examines three interconnected case studies: the collecting and photographic practices of Australian troops in Palestine and the gendered subtexts of souvenir production; the exhibitions and cultural diplomacy strategies of Ali Kazak, whose curatorial work between 1979 and 2003 redefined Palestinian cultural representation in Australia; and the dialogues between Palestinian diaspora artists and Australian practitioners engaging with Arab liberationist aesthetics. These case studies will illuminate how Palestinian cultural actors negotiated the tension between advocacy and heritage presentation, while also shaping local art scenes. The fellowship will produce a scholarly article and contribute towards research for an exhibition on Arab-Australian relations. By recovering overlooked transnational artistic connections, this research advances new understandings of cultural diplomacy and contributes to the reframing Australian art history within a broader global and decolonial context. 

Sophie Guo
The Courtauld Institute of Art

Dr Sophie Guo is an art historian and curator specialising in modern and contemporary Chinese and global art and visual culture, with a particular focus on the intersections of art, medicine, and biopolitics across transnational and transhistorical contexts. 

Her research interests include the visual medical humanities and feminist and queer technoscience; socialist and post-socialist engagements with art and biotechnology; biosurveillance, disease narratives, and art in Hong Kong and Taiwan; as well as the politics of contagion, hygiene, and colonial medical archives in visual culture. 

Her essays have appeared in immediations, Burlington Contemporary, Cultural China 2021 (University of Westminster Press), Tate Research Centre: Asia, and the Courtauld’s Gender and Sexuality Research Group. She has also contributed criticism and interviews to ArtReview, Ocula, and Cura Magazine, as well as catalogue essays for the Wolfgang Hahn Prize at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and for numerous international galleries. She is currently co-editing, with Ari Heinrich, a special issue on the display of biohazards in contemporary Asian art, and editing a bilingual scholarly volume on Hoo Mojong (1924–2012), supported by the Bao Foundation and Asia Society Hong Kong Center. 

Sophie has also undertaken curatorial research and curated exhibitions in museums, galleries, and alternative spaces. 

Project title: Viral Imaginaries: The Art of China and Its Diasporas in a Time of Global Health Crisis 
 
Abstract: This project investigates how contemporary artists of Chinese descent interrogate the body politic and reimagine disease narratives in times of global health crises. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the body has increasingly been defined in biomedical, biotechnical, and biopolitical terms. This shift has intensified attention to the molecular interfaces of the genetic, endocrine, and immune systems, as well as to the infrastructural dimensions of health. At the same time, the pandemic has witnessed a proliferation of imaginaries that link invisible viral agents to visible identity markers, particularly those associated with race and gender. These conditions invite a reassessment of how biopower operates upon the body and of the implications of biologised notions of identity when viewed through historical and socio-political lenses. 

The project centres on how contemporary artists from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the diaspora have responded to and reimagined the entanglements between contagion, biopolitics, and identity. By situating their practices within contexts ranging from the HIV/AIDS epidemic in China to the politics of hygiene during SARS and COVID-19, the research foregrounds the critical role of the Sinosphere in visualising the lived and symbolic dimensions of global health emergencies.  

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.