Dr Jane Eckett

ARC Postdoctoral Research Associate
School of Culture & Communications, University of Melbourne


Jane Eckett is an art historian, curator and Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She holds a Masters of Letters (MLitt) from Trinity College Dublin and a PhD from the University of Melbourne, awarded in 2017. Her research focuses on modernist sculpture, public art and memorials, diaspora art and émigré networks. She has worked as a sessional lecturer in art history at University College Dublin (2007-09) and the University of Melbourne (2010-19) and regularly speaks in public, most recently delivering the 2019 annual Duldig Lecture. Alongside her doctoral research on the Centre Five group she catalogued the studio contents and archives of sculptors Norma Redpath, Inge King and painter-printmaker Grahame King. As the 2018 Ursula Hoff Fellow she researched Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack’s monotypes in the collections of the Ian Potter Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2019, with Harriet Edquist, she co-curated Melbourne Modern: European Art and Design at RMIT since 1945 for RMIT Gallery and co-edited the accompanying catalogue with support from the Gordon Darling Foundation. Other recent publications include chapters in Bauhaus Diaspora: Transforming Education in Art, Architecture and Design (MUP in association with Power Publications, Sydney, 2019) and Modern Australia: Australian Modernism in Architecture, Landscape and Design, 1925-75 (Thames and Hudson, London, 2019). She is currently Postdoctoral Research Associate on an Australian Research Council 2020 Discovery Project, ‘The Abbey Art Centre: Reassessing post-WW2 Australian art, 1946-1956’, working with a multi-institutional team of researchers led by Professor Ian McLean at the University of Melbourne.  She has also recently been awarded a 2021 Melbourne Research Fellowship at the University of Melbourne.

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