Professor Catherine Speck

Catherine Speck is Professor of Art History at the University of Adelaide, and a Fellow of the Academy of Humanities of Australia. She convened postgraduate programs in Art History and Curatorial and Museum Studies taught jointly by the University of Adelaide and the Art Gallery of South Australia from 2002-2019. She was Head of Art History and Theory from 1995-1999 at the SA School of Art, UniSA, and a Hawke Fellow in 1999. She is a specialist in all areas of Australian art. Her publications and ongoing research are in the areas of the intersection between art history, museology and curatorship; gender and art history; cross-national and post-national art histories with reference to Australian expatriate artists and impressionism; international exhibitions of Australian art and early exhibitions of Aboriginal art. Her published books and key book chapters include: ‘Whisperings of Wilderness in Australian Centenary Landscapes’, in Colonisation, Wilderness and Spaces Between: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting in  Australia and the United States (Terra Foundation /University of Chicago Press, UWA Art and Design, 2020); Heysen to Heysen: Selected Letters of Hans Heysen and Nora Heysen (a father-daughter artistic  relationship) (National Library of Australia, 2011; Wakefield Press, 2019);  Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening our Eyes (with Joanna Mendelssohn, Catherine De Lorenzo and AIison Inglis (Thames and Hudson, 2018); ‘Forging Culture: Australian Art in the Nineteenth Century’, in A Companion to Nineteenth Century Art (Wiley Blackwell, 2018); Beyond the Battlefield: Women Artists of the Two World Wars (Reaktion, 2014);  and Painting Ghosts (Craftsman House / Thames and Hudson, 2004). She is widely published, a recipient of numerous ARC grants, on the editorial board of the DAAO,  and a member of the Fay Gale Centre for Research into Gender and the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.