Congratulations to the 2027 Sir William Dobell Chair and Fellows!

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 2027.

CHAIR

Professor Rebecca Brown
Johns Hopkins University

Rebecca M. Brown is Professor of the History of Art and Chair of the Museum Studies, Cultural Heritage Management, and Organisational Leadership programs atJohns Hopkins University. Her books include Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (2009), a critical engagement with modernism in the decades after decolonisation; Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (2010), which traces the genealogy of spinning and the anti-colonial movement of the early twentieth century; and Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India (2017), a study of the diplomatic, museological, and cultural machinations of the long 1980s. She has co-edited seven volumes and special issues on photography, craft, place, and the art of Asia, and has curated exhibitions and consulted for museums and galleries in North America and India. Her latest book, Modernism in Relation: KCS Paniker’s Written Pictures (Getty Research Institute, 2026), tracks the southern Indian painter as he seeks out a language of painting, from editorial citations and illegible scribbles to the vibrant garden and the hum of colour.  

Project title: Esoteric Spiritualities & the Roots of Humanist Method   

Abstract: This project springs from a simple provocation: esoteric belief systems lie at the foundations of humanistic disciplines. Looking to art history's disciplinary roots in German thought, on the one hand, and to India's twentieth-century art, on the other, this project takes seriously South Asian artists' engagements with Theosophy, astrology, Adivasi (Indigenous) epistemologies, and Tantrism. In doing so, it recognises the Indic foundations of these beliefs, takes seriously Indian artists' practice as illuminating the centrality of spiritualism for twentieth-century art and history, and tracks the humanities' deep disciplinary imbrication in these same epistemologies. 
 

FELLOWS [in alphabetical order by last name]:

Dr Sarah Carter
Sarah Carter is currently the Census Fellow in the Reception of Antiquity at the Warburg Institute in London and the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. She specialises in the art and visual culture of Britain and its empire during the long nineteenth century, with an emphasis on histories of collecting and antiquarianism. Her current research project, “Empire Follows Art”: Culture, Heritage, and Conservation in Imperial Britain and South Asia, 1780–1880, has been awarded major postdoctoral fellowships by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec (FRQSC). Sarah has held postdoctoral fellowships and academic appointments in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago and the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at the University of Notre Dame. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Yale Center for British Art, the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Huntington Library, and has appeared in Oxford Art Journal, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, RACAR, and Lumen.

Project title: Ambivalence in the Archive: Culture, Heritage, and Conservation in South Asia, 1780–1880   

Abstract: During my time at ANU, I plan to write an article for British Art Studies’ Animating the Archive series. The series’ digital format provides a unique opportunity to present and critically contextualise the archival sources at the centre of my second book project, Empire Follows Art: Culture, Heritage, and Conservation in Imperial Britain and South Asia, 1780–1880. Bringing together drawings, photographs, journals, and correspondence from collections in Britain, Australia, and North America, the article will examine the tensions and ambiguities that shaped colonial encounters with sacred architecture in India and facilitated its reproduction and circulation through imperial networks. It will likewise examine representations of British architecture by Indian artists, highlighting the ways in which architectural knowledge was not simply transmitted from Britain to India but produced through reciprocal cultural encounters.  

Dr Suzanna Henty
University of Melbourne

Dr Suzannah Henty is the Hugh Ramsay Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History and Curatorship in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Conferred in 2025 by the University of Melbourne and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, her PhD research traced a history of decolonial solidarity in contemporary art. Her research, which sits at the intersection of Australian art history, decolonial theory and national identity, has been published in Radical Philosophy, Index Journal, The Funambulist, Jerusalem Quarterly and Kunstlicht, among other publications.   

Project title: On the other side of nationalism: George Lambert’s war art in Palestine

Abstract: This research re-centres the Palestinian landscape in official war artist George Washington Lambert’s minor sketches and watercolours painted en plein air during the First World War. From Khurbet Sihan (Gaza) to the Galilee, Jaffa and Jericho, Lambert’s sketches document the geographical breadth Australian soldiers travelled throughout Palestine. Unlike his major battle scenes painted in his London studio, Lambert’s in situ sketches are war paintings of peace that romanticise everyday life in which conflict is a memory. As a 2027 Sir William Dobell Visiting Fellow, I will work closely with the Australian War Memorial and the Mitchell Library (SLNSW) to map Lambert’s landscapes of Palestine alongside his diaries and correspondence. This research will explore Lambert’s relationship to Palestine, which he referred to as the ‘Promised Land’, and consider what new perspectives this brings to Australian art history. 

Dr Lisa Hilli
Monash University

Lisa Hilli is a Papua New Guinean-Australian creative practitioner, researcher, and cultural consultant working across art history, curatorial practice, and archival research. Her PhD by Creative Works at the Australian National University, A Lens of One's Own: The visuality and visibility of Papua New Guinean mixed-race women, examines the in/visibility of Papua New Guinean women within photographic archives. Hilli's recent work includes co-curation of Points of View: Artistic and Scientific Perspectives on German Colonial History in the Western Pacific at the Harbour Museum Bremen and German Maritime Museum (2024) and Sydney Road Blaks: Blak Mobility and Settler Surveillance at Counihan Gallery (2022). She was a curatorial and cultural advisor to the Kirchner and Nolde exhibitions at SMK Copenhagen, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Brücke Museum Berlin (2021), held a 2021 International Research Fellowship with the Leibniz Institute for Maritime History at the German Maritime Museum, and was a Reference Group Member for the Oceania Hub at the Humboldt Forum (2025 —2026). 

Her writing appears in the Australian Journal of Biography and History: Oceania Lives, Galang Vol. 2, and FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und Visuelle Kultur (Journal of Gender Studies and Visual Culture). She has given guest lectures at the ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory, RMIT University, the University of Melbourne, Monash University, and Berlin University of the Arts. Hilli’s photographic-textile works are held within the Australian War Memorial and Art Gallery of NSW.  

Project title: After Hanuabada: Lens-based histories by Papua New Guinean photographers  

Abstract: In 1975, weeks after Papua New Guinea (PNG) gained independence from Australia on 16 September, the exhibition Hanuabada: photographic works by Mathias Balive, Anita Baru, and Gava Aura marked a significant moment in the camera lens changing hands away from the colonial gaze to visual representations of and by Papua New Guinean people. Documented records of the Hanuabada exhibition are sparse and have been overlooked by art historians and curators specialising in PNG art. During my PhD at the ANU, I located the exhibition’s original poster in the National Gallery of Australia’s Print Collection, preserved through the papers of the late Professor Anthony Forge.

After Hanuabada builds on this discovery and aims to recover the exhibition so that future generations of Papua New Guinean photographers have an art history they can reference. During the Sir William Dobell Visiting Fellowship  to the ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory, I will undertake further archival research across Canberra’s collections and convene a workshop with Papua New Guinean community members to review the material, share knowledge and identify contributors to a future publication. This community-engaged approach treats the exhibition as living memory as well as archival record. This research positions the 1975 photographic exhibition as a key art historical reference point for visual histories and narratives of and by Papua New Guinean people. 

Professor Jung Joon Lee
Rhode Island School of Design

Jung Joon Lee is a professor of the history and theory of photography and contemporary art of East Asia and its diasporas at Rhode Island School of Design. Lee’s research centers on the relationship between artistic practice and knowledge production, with a current interest in transoceanic intimacies as an anticolonial aesthetic. Her book Shooting for Change: Korean Photography after the War (Duke UP, 2024) examines how photography makes meaning and shapes history through the lens of Korea’s transnational militarism. Lee’s research has also appeared in journals including History of Photography, photographies, Journal of Korean Studies, Trans Asia Photography, Burlington Contemporary, and PhotoResearcher. Lee is currently working on a book project, Tiny Worldings: Making Transoceanic Relations through Exhibitions, examining four transpacific and transatlantic photography and art exhibitions as sites of collaboration and kinship-making—but not without tensions, letdowns, and letting go. As part of her ongoing collaborative practice, Lee co-curated the exhibition What My Body Never Forgets: Reclaiming Radical Intimacies of Trans-Asia, which opens at the University of Oxford’s Kendrew Barn Gallery in January 2027. 

Project title: Negotiating Borders: Exhibiting the Korean DMZ in Australia 
 
Abstract: What responsibilities does an exhibition have when it enters a new political and historical context? How might the meanings of the Korean demilitarised zone (DMZ) presented in an exhibition shift when viewed in Australia rather than Korea, or indeed anywhere else? This research project examines the 2022 exhibition Negotiating Borders, Sydney, which was organized as a travelling exhibition by the REAL DMZ PROJECT, a group of South Korean artists and curators committed to showcasing artworks to reveal the ‘real’ Korean DMZ beyond nationalist propaganda. Lee’s research examines how issues of territory, sovereignty, and Indigeneity within Australia’s settler colonial context complicate the representation of the Korean borderland, while asking what it means for a project symbolising past atrocities and future reparations to travel globally as an object of cultural diplomacy. This analysis provides insights into the intersections of art, geopolitics, and cultural diplomacy, enhancing our understanding of these dynamics within Cold War and settler colonial contexts. 

From there, the research investigates art’s contribution to a more salient and nuanced engagement with the transpacific histories of violence, intimacy, and belonging toward repair. It pays particular attention to works by artists working and living in Australia, including Wollongong-based Haji Oh. Such an emphasis may also open up possibilities for aligning with the decolonial efforts of Australian and diasporic artists.  

Dr Henry Skerrit 
The Courtauld Institute of Art

Henry Skerritt is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Virginia. From 2016 to 2022 he was a curator at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, the only museum outside Australia dedicated exclusively to Indigenous Australian art. He holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and an MA in Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne. He has curated or co-curated more than twenty-five exhibitions, including the major touring exhibitions Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala, developed with Yolŋu leaders from Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, and Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu | Past & Present Together: Fifty Years of Papunya Tula Artists, in collaboration with Papunya Tula Artists. His forthcoming manuscript Paintings Need Family: Curatorial Jurisdiction and the Making of Maḏayin is currently under review. 

Project title: Indigenous Peoples and the Institutions of Art 
 
Abstract: Indigenous Peoples and the Institutions of Art is a multinational exploration of how Indigenous artists have reshaped the institutions that define modern art. Henry Skerritt’s project examines art history, museums, markets, and cities across Australia, Aotearoa, and Haida Gwaii, asking how artists have made these institutions answerable to Indigenous knowledge, values, and authority. While in Canberra, Skerritt plans to investigate Narritjin and Banapana Maymuru’s 1978 H. C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship at ANU and Banduk Marika’s 1984 residency at the Canberra School of Art. Drawing on archives and interviews, he will examine how these Yolŋu artists entered the university as teachers, intellectuals, and cultural leaders. He will also research the Aboriginal Arts Board’s international exhibitions during the 1970s, tracing how Indigenous cultural ambitions intersected with cultural diplomacy, commercial sponsorship, and emerging art markets. The project builds on Skerritt’s ten years of collaboration with Yolŋu artists and knowledge holders on the exhibition Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Paintings from Yirrkala, which toured the United States from 2022 to 2025. Archival findings will inform conversations with artists’ families and communities, whose perspectives will shape the book. Together, these histories reveal how Indigenous artists have used institutions to sustain cultural knowledge, reach new audiences, and reshape the possibilities of contemporary art.  

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.