Jill Harrison was appointed to a 2 year position in the Art History department in September 2009. She joined the Open University as an Associate Lecturer in Art History in the North Region in 1996 after completing a BA Hons. Since then she has tutored courses from pre foundation to Postgraduate level. These include Making Sense of the Arts, Art and its Histories, Modern Art and Modernisms, the Postgraduate foundation Module in Art History, Themes and Issues in contemporary art history and the Art History Dissertation. Her particular interest lies in Italian Renaissance art and she has also taught Art in fifteenth century Italy, Devotion and Display: Religious Art in Italy 1300 -1500, Art, Society and Religion in Siena, Florence and Padua 1280–1400 and Renaissance Art Reconsidered.
In 2003 she completed an M.Phil at Newcastle University entitled An assessment of Giotto’s social and artistic enterprise: His influence on the first articulation of a theory of art and the changing status of the artist . She is currently completing a Phd with the Open University which further explores this topic in Giotto’s enterprise: art, avarice and ambition in Trecento Italy’ and she was made a Research Affiliate in 2008. She has given Postgraduate conference papers on this topic at the Architectural Association (2007) and the Open University (2008, 2009) and her paper Being Florentine: A Trecento Identity crisis, presented at Aberdeen University (2008) on the frescoes in the Arte della Lana, Florence is being prepared for publication as a chapter section in a forthcoming book Art and Identity: Visual Culture, Politics and Religion in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Cambridge Academic Publishers).
She has been co-convener of an interdisciplinary postgraduate conference The court is on earth an ymage infernall: Life at the European Courts, University of London (2007) and the Open University MA conference (2008) She is a member of the Courtauld Institute of Art’s research group, ‘Giotto’s Circle’ and the Open University’s Material Cultures Research Group.
Jill has been involved with the introduction of e-tuition in the Open University and has piloted online tuition and learning strategies which were incorporated into the MA. She has given papers on e-tuition at regional and national level and is currently overseeing the VLE element of the forthcoming second level course, Exploring Art and Visual Culture (first presentation in 2012).
Contact Jill.Harrison@open.ac.uk