Veronica Davies joined the Art History department as a Lecturer in November, 2010. Having done her first degree with the OU, and following a career with an IT focus in the civil service, she returned to become an Associate Lecturer in 1999 and has since taught art history and interdisciplinary courses at all levels, from level one short courses to the art history MA.
Her recent and current work for the Art History department includes acting as chair for Openings course Y180, Making sense of the arts, contributing to the running of the Art History MA and other courses, and working on material for the department’s websites and the VLE component of the forthcoming level 2 course, Exploring art and visual culture. She is also co-convenor of the Association of Art Historians 2012 conference, to be hosted by the OU at Walton Hall. A particular interest is in fostering good study skills for art history students, and she has recently developed a range of online skills materials for postgraduate and undergraduate students.
An undergraduate project on British World War II war artists led to her research interest in British and German art and art institutions of the 1940s and 50s. This was developed in her MA dissertation on exhibitions in Britain during World War II and their relationship with modern art, and extended in her doctoral thesis which compared state art policies, institutional practices and exhibition organisation in Britain and Germany between1945-51, and focused in particular on cultural policies in the British-occupied Zone of North West Germany. More recently, support from the OU’s research associate scheme for Associate Lecturers enabled her to carry out research into the early Cold War period of the 1950s. She has given a number of related conference papers, and hopes to publish her research before too long.
Contact: v.davies@open.ac.uk
September 2010: Post-war to Cold War: Exhibiting Change after 1945 in Cold War Cultures conference, University of Texas at Austin
December 2008: ‘Steering a progressive course’? Exhibitions in wartime and postwar Britain Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
April 2007: ‘Closing the wounds’? The role of exhibitions in post-war Germany in the session Contested Histories in German Visual Culture 1871-1990, AAH, Belfast
February 2007: The legacies of National Socialist art policies in the British Zone of Germany, 1945-50 in the session Art History and National Socialist Germany: A Reevaluation, College Art Association, New York
October 2004: German Initiatives and British Interventions 1945-51 at the conference Kontinuität und Neubeginn. Kunstgeschichte im westlichen Nachkriegsdeutschland Bonn University, also published in anthology Kunstgeschichte nach 1945. Kontinuität und Neubeginn in Deutschland, Cologne 2006
Forthcoming: ‘And now, over Germany, the derelict day is resumed’: British and German experiences 1945-50 in the session Out of Rubble, CAA Los Angeles, 2012
