Dr Richard Checketts
- Position: Associate Professor in Renaissance Art and Culture
- Areas of expertise: Late-Renaissance art, architecture, technologies and philosophy; historical and critical approaches to materials
- Email: R.S.Checketts@leeds.ac.uk
- Phone: +44(0)113 343 5268
- Location: 3.15 Fine Art Building
Profile
I am Associate Professor in Renaissance Art and Culture, and currently Programme Director for the BA Art History and Art History with Cultural Studies, and for the MA Social History of Art. I was Deputy Head of School from August 2020 to July 2024, and before that Asessment Lead and Deputy Director of Student Education. Before returning to the University as a Lecturer, I had previously held a Leverhulme postdoctoral research fellowship, followed by two years at the Victoria & Albert Museum where I taught on the MA in Design History run jointly between the Museum and the Royal College of Art. My PhD, supervised by Professor Alex Potts and Professor Christine Stevenson, was on eighteenth-century art theory, and I held a Yale University Paul Mellon Centre postdoctoral research fellowship to work on the same topic. My undergraduate degree was in photographic practice.
Currently I am an external examiner at the University of St Andrews. I have previously acted in that role at the University of York, and at Birkbeck, University of London, as well as serving as a panel member for the quinquennial review for Humanities at the University of Buckingham, where I also conducted an external review of all modules in Art History. I have acted as an external PhD thesis advisor at the University of York, and have served on the PhD scholarship awards committee for the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities (linking the universities of Leeds, Sheffield, and York). From 2019–2022 I worked with colleagues in art history across the UK on the Association for Art History Higher Education Committee.
I am on the editorial board of the international journal Art History. From September 2024 I will hold a twelve-month Associate Senior Fellowship at the British School at Rome.
Responsibilities
- Programme Director, BA Art History and BA Art History with Cultural Studies
- Programme Director, MA Social History of Art
Research interests
Broadly my research is on Europe, including its global networks, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I am interested in artistic practice as integral to the larger structures through which societies exist and transform, and my work embraces the complex connections in late-Renaissance culture between art and various other kinds of knowledge and practice, centrally natural philosophy, politics, and conceptions of history. My current projects are grounded in a long-standing engagement with materials, their history within different intellectual and practical frameworks, and in so far as they can themselves be approached as points of political and social transformation – that is, in so far as concrete uses of particular materials in art, concrete discussions around their value and properties, could shape and reshape the structural relationships between makers, patrons and others. My principal area of focus at present is seventeenth-century Rome, with a monograph in progress on cultures of building and architecture, the natural philosophy of stone and new approaches to the political dynamics of patronage. This project is being supported in 2024–2025 through an Associate Senior Fellowship awarded by the British School at Rome. I am also completing an article on glass and questions of value that emerged across sixteenth-century Europe as a result of expanding global trading networks and conflicts. A chapter entitled ‘Adam van Vianen and Ghosts of Silver in the Late Renaissance World’, which deals with connected issues of value and ideas about the material nature of ghosts, was published recently as part of a volume edited by Professor Helen Hills, with the British Academy and Oxford University Press. I have also published on English art theory in the eighteenth century.
I would welcome PhD enquiries for projects grounded in any of these areas, and in critical and historical approaches to materials in broader contexts (including in practice-led work).
<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>Qualifications
- PhD
- BA (Hons)
Student education
My teaching covers a range of topics and approaches in late-Renaissance art and architecture, with more focused courses on ideas about materials in that period. I also teach on historiography, methodology and critical theory, leading the MA Social History of Art core module in this area. For the latter, my teaching addresses a number of the ‘canonical’ figures in the discipline of Art History, and I am also particularly interested in the work of Antonio Gramsci, Italian microhistory and related intellectual frameworks.
I am passionate about research-driven teaching where students play an active role, and about the transformational potential of a challenging, dynamic and intellectually rigorous educational environment. Throughout my time at Leeds I have collaborated on improvements in student education, from assessment to module- and programme design. At present, I am co-ordinating major curriculum redesign in art history at undergraduate and taught postgraduate levels, as part of a University-wide project. More broadly within the School, I am interested in developing collaborations in the ways in which we might think about ‘practice’ as something integral to all forms of activity we carry out – in the seminar room as much as in the studio.
At Leeds I have supervised six PhDs through to completion, with a seventh in its final stages. I am keen to work on interdisciplinary projects, and this has meant that much of my supervision has been with colleagues in other Schools: in History with Dr Alex Bamji, and (for two projects) in Philosophy, Religion, and the History of Science with Professor James Stark, Professor Jon Topham, and Dr Adrian Wilson.
Current and recent PhD projects
- Lucy Crouch on materiality and drawing, with Dr Jo McGonigal (practice-led, expected completion 2025)
- Li Huang on satire in visual and literary culture in the British Isles in the eighteenth century (as a visiting researcher, Zhejiang University, 2023)
- Fiona Sit on Bernini and clay, with Dr Eva Frojmovic (2023)
- Hannah Kašpar on Robert Adam and artisanal networks, with Dr Kerry Bristol (2022)
- David Rowe on sexual health advertising, with Professor James Stark and Dr Adrian Wilson (2021)
- Giulia Zanon on citizenship in early modern Venice, with Dr Alex Bamji (2019)
- Richard Bellis on making anatomical knowledge in late-Georgian Britain, with Professor Jon Topham and Dr Adrian Wilson (2019)
- Luisa Lorenza Corna on Manfredo Tafuri, with Professor Gail Day (2016)
I have also acted as an external thesis advisory panel member for a PhD project completed at the University of York: Fabrizio Ballabio on architecture and political reform in eighteenth-century Naples, with Professor Helen Hills and Dr Richard Johns (2022).