Profile
Biography
BA (Yale University), PhD (University of California, Berkeley)
Jeremy Melius joined the department in 2024 as a lecturer in British art. His research focuses on the modern period in a variety of national contexts, centring on British art and art criticism since the 1840s. His approach has often been framed by the complex entanglements of word and image, and their consequences for the treatment of works of art as forms of historical evidence.
His work has been supported by the Huntington Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, Villa I Tatti, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the Clark Art Institute, and eikones – Center for the Theory and History of Images at the University of Basel, among other institutions.
Research
Overview
Jeremy has published widely on figures such as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Pablo Picasso, and Lee Bontecou, and on topics such as the history of connoisseurship, the reception of Renaissance art, and the relation between photography and sculpture. A special focus of interest has been the history of anglophone art writing, with its strong, experimental approaches to questions of affect, ethics, environment, and empire, and to the pleasures and dangers of close description.
He is currently completing a book entitled The Invention of Botticelli, which reconsiders the artist’s ‘rediscovery’ during the nineteenth century and its consequences for the emergent discipline of art history, with its developing sense of art as an embodiment of the past. A second book project extends these concerns, focusing on the Victorian critic John Ruskin’s fraught relation to the past, present, and future of the historical interpretation of art. It aims to bring into focus what remains living in Ruskin’s complex thought, and to offer a new approach to the intensity of this critic’s attention to the visible world, the politics of artistic form, and the complexities of being close to works of visual art.
Another project addresses the ‘impersonal intimacy’ of later nineteenth-century art writing. It investigates the ways in which experimental practices of response and description undertaken by figures such as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, and Henry James came to imagine new modes of relation to other people and to the world.
