Global Bodies: 1700-Present: Art, Race, Identity, Encounters

The project "Global Bodies" examines closely and collaboratively a range of representations of the human body produced in a variety of national, cultural, political and religious contexts from the eighteenth century through to today. It prioritises critical cross-disciplinary and transnational analyses of different objects and images from a range of geographies that engage with the themes of: typologies of the body; racialised bodies; bodies and identity; encounters between bodies; bodies in transition; bodies and mobility; and the body with and without borders. A global perspective on depictions of the human body produced for the purposes of artistic and medical education, aesthetic edification, and scientific and professional advancement serves as a timely disruption of assumptions about the normative human body (white, male, healthy, etc.) perpetuated through the Western (anatomical) tradition.

Natasha Ruiz-Gómez is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Essex.

Keren Hammerschlag is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory in the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University.

Tania Anne Cleaves (née Woloshyn) is Associate Fellow in the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick. 

Rebecca Whiteley is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham.

Sonia Favi is an assistant professor in Japanese Studies at the Department of Humanities of the University of Turin.