Sarah Thomas
-
Overview
Overview
This member of staff is currently on sabbatical.
Biography
Sarah Thomas has lectured widely in the UK and Australia. In 2001 her professional standing was recognised by the award of an Australian Government Centenary Medal for service to Australian society and art. She has taught museum cultures and history of art at Birkbeck since 2013. She has also taught at Kingston University and UCL. She is the inaugural Director of Birkbeck's Centre for Museum Cultures.
Her current book project is called Chattel: Art, Slavery and the British Collector, 1768-1833 (Paul Mellon Centre Senior Fellowship 2024-25; Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship 2022-23). By tracing the provenance histories of key works of art, the project examines a core group of collectors (including George Watson Taylor, William Young Ottley, Philip John Miles, Cecilia Douglas and William Beckford) who benefitted financially to a considerable degree from the plantation economy.
Her monograph Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition was published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in 2019. It examines the shifting iconography of slavery in British and European art between 1760 and 1840, and reconsiders how enslaved people were depicted within a historical context in which truth was deeply contested.
Other projects include 'Colonial Ways of Seeing: Caribbean Visual Cultures, 1750-1900' (August 2021). This special issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents was co-edited with Emily Senior and examines the ways of seeing that emerged under the conditions of slavery and its immediate aftermath. How were images and objects produced, circulated and viewed in colonial contexts? What forms of resistance are revealed by a focus on visual cultures? What traces of Black lives can yet be mined in the fragments and biases of the colonial archive?
Office hours
By appointment
Qualifications
- PhD, University of Sydney, 2013
- Fellow, Higher Education Academy, 2018
Professional activities
Regular peer reviewer for academic journals including Art History, Journal of Historial Geography, and Atlantic Studies.
PhD External Examiner - topics have included colonial Caribbean visual culture, curatorial practice, the colonial representation of Australian Aborigines, and Australian colonial landscape painting.
Editorial Board, Art History
External Examiner, UCL History of Art Department, undergraduate programmes
Honours and awards
- Visiting Scholarship, Yale Center for British Art, November 2019
- Senior Fellowship, Paul Mellon Centre, November 2024
- Research Fellowship, Leverhulme, November 2022
- Postgraduate Fellowship, Paul Mellon Centre , November 2015
- Cultural Engagement Fellowship, AHRC, November 2013
- Research Support Grant, Paul Mellon Centre, November 2009
- Scholarship for the Study of Prints at the British Museum, Sarah & William Holmes Foundation, University of Melbourne, November 1997
- Centenary Medal for Services to Australian Art and Society, Australian Government, November 2001
ORCID
0000-0003-2922-7543 -
Research
Research
Research interests
- Slave-ownership - cultural legacies
- Art and empire
- Slavery and visual culture
- Museology and empire
- Art and travel
- Decolonisation and museums
- Australian and Caribbean colonial art
- Art curating
Research overview
My current project is 'Slavery and the British Art Collector, 1768-1833', which re-evaluates the history of art collecting between 1768 (the establishment of the Royal Academy) and 1833 (Abolition of Slavery Act) by exploring its myriad links with enslavement. It is a story which has remained largely hidden yet which has substantial ramifications for our understanding of Britain’s artistic heritage.
More generally my research focuses on the art history and museology of the British empire, the role and particularities of the itinerant artist, the visual representation of enslavement and the cultural legacies of British slave-ownership. My monograph, 'Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition' was published by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art for Yale University Press in September 2019.
Previous publications include 'The Encounter, 1802: Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyages' (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2002); book chapters ‘Slaves and the spectacle of torture: British artists in the New World, 1800-1834’ and ‘Allegorizing Extinction: Humboldt, Darwin and the Valedictory Image’; journal articles such as ‘Envisaging a Future for Slavery: Agostino Brunias and the Imperial Politics of Labor and Reproduction’ (Eighteenth-Century Studies) and ‘The Spectre of Empire in the British Art Museum’ (Museum History Journal).
Research Centres and Institutes
- Director, Centre for Museum Cultures
- Member, Peltz Gallery
-
Supervision and teaching
Supervision and teaching
This member of staff is currently on sabbatical.
Supervision
I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students who are interested in undertaking research in any of my specialist areas.
Current doctoral researchers
-
LIBERTY PATERSON
-
SEAN CHAM
Doctoral alumni since 2013-14
-
CARLO RIZZO
Teaching
I currently teach on the MA Museum Cultures programme, and am module leader for the core course 'Approaches, Issues, Skills'. I lead an intensive module in the spring term called 'Curating', and an MA option called 'Slavery and its Cultural Legacies'.
-
-
Publications
Publications
Article
- Thomas, Sarah (2022) The specter of slavery in the British Art Museum. American Art 36 (2), ISSN 1073-9300.
- Thomas, Sarah (2022) Swollen detail, or what a vessel might give: Agostino Brunias and the visual and material culture of colonial Dominica. Atlantic Studies 19 (1), pp. 60-85. ISSN 1478-8810.
- Thomas, Sarah and Eaton, N. (2021) Swollen detail, or what a vessel might give: Agostino Brunias and the visual and material culture of colonial Dominica. Atlantic Studies ISSN 1478-8810.
- Thomas, Sarah (2018) Envisaging a future for slavery: Agostino Brunias and the imperial politics of labor and reproduction. Eighteenth-Century Studies 52 (1), pp. 115-133. ISSN 0013-2586.
- Thomas, Sarah Bernier, Celeste-Marie, ed. (2014) Book review: Marcus Wood, "Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Journal of American Studies 48 (4), pp. 1103-1104. ISSN 0021-8758.
- Thomas, Sarah (2013) The spectre of empire in the British art museum. Museum History Journal 6 (1), pp. 105-121. ISSN 1936-9816.
- Thomas, Sarah (2011) "On the Spot": travelling artists and Abolitionism, 1770-1830. Atlantic Studies 8 (2), pp. 213-232. ISSN 1478-8810.
Book
- Thomas, Sarah (2019) Witnessing slavery: art and travel in the age of abolition. London, UK: Yale University Press. ISBN 9781913107055. (In Press)
- Thomas, Sarah, ed. (2002) The encounter, 1802: art of the Flinders and Baudin voyages. Adelaide, Australia: Art Gallery of South Australia. ISBN 730830055.
Book Review
- Thomas, Sarah (2022) Art history and racial Capitalism. Book review, 'Black Bodies, White Gold' by Anna Arabinden-Kesson.
- Thomas, Sarah (2022) 'The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800–1852' / 'Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World'. By Martha J. Cutter, Athens, The University of George Press, 2017, xviii. 291pp., $44.95 and $34.95, ISBN 9-780-8203-5875-8by Dale W. Tomich, Rafael de Bivar Marquese, Reinaldo Runes Monzote, Carlo Venegas Fornias, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2021, xii. 161pp., $95.00 and $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6312-8 and 978-1-4696-6311-1.
- Thomas, Sarah (2018) The Legacies of Bernard Smith. Essays on Australian Art, History and Cultural Politics. By Jaynie Anderson, Christopher R. Marshall and Andrew Yip, editor(s). 370 pp. incl. 44 col. + 5 b. & w. ills. (Power Publications in association with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2016), A$39.99. 9780994306432 (paperback)..
Book Section
- Thomas, Sarah (2021) The dark side of the landscape: Kehinde Wiley and the Black Sublime. In: Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery: The Prelude. London, UK: National Gallery Company Ltd. pp. 65-77. ISBN 9781857096774.
- Thomas, Sarah (2021) ‘La esclavitud en Rio de Janeiro a través de la mirada europea: Rugendas, Earle y Debret en los albores de la independencia de Brasil’. In: Diener, P. and Costa, F. (eds.) Rugendas: El Artista Viajero. Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Biblioteca Nacional de Chile. pp. 49-71. ISBN 9789562445160.
- Thomas, Sarah (2020) The art of travel in the name of science: mobility and erasure in the art of Flinders’s Australian voyage, 1801-03. In: Lambert, D. and Merriman, P. (eds.) Empire and Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century. Studies in Imperialism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ISBN 9781526126382. (In Press)
- Thomas, Sarah (2016) Creating a national identity: Australia's Impressionist landscapes. In: Thomas, Sarah and Riopelle, C. and Bonyhady, T. and Goudie, A. and Tunnicliffe, W. and Taylor, A.J. (eds.) Australia's Impressionists. London, UK: Yale University Press and The National Gallery Press. pp. 43-50. ISBN 9781857096125.
- Thomas, Sarah (2015) Allegorizing extinction: Humboldt, Darwin and the valedictory image. In: Brauer, Fae and Keshavjee, Serena (eds.) Picturing Evolution and Extinction. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 9781443872539.
- Thomas, Sarah (2014) The artist travels: Augustus Earle at sea. In: Cusack, T. (ed.) Framing the Ocean: Envisaging The Sea As A Social Space. Basingstoke, UK: Ashgate. pp. 71-84. ISBN 9781409465683.
- Thomas, Sarah (2013) Violence and memory: slavery in the museum. In: Rycroft, D.J. (ed.) World Art and the Legacies of Colonial Violence. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. pp. 113-132. ISBN 9781409455882.
- Thomas, Sarah (2009) The Wanderer, the Slave and the Aboriginal: Augustus Earle in Rio de Janeiro and Sydney in the 1820s. In: Anderson, J. (ed.) Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence. Carlton, Australia: Miegunyah Press. ISBN 9780522857108.
- Thomas, Sarah (2009) Slavery, a "Scandal to Christian Nations": Charles Darwin, Augustus Earle and the compass of morality. In: Hoorn, J. (ed.) Reframing Darwin: Evolution and Art in Australia. Carlton, Australia: Melbourne University Publishing. ISBN 9780522856842.
Editorial
- Thomas, Sarah and Senior, Emily (2021) Colonial ways of seeing: Caribbean visual cultures 1750–1900. Atlantic Studies Taylor & Francis. ISSN 1478-8810. (In Press)