DrKeith Broadfoot

Senior Lecturer in the Art History discipline. Over the years, my teaching has engaged with a broad range of Western art, covering topics from the Renaissance to film and contemporary media.  With an interest in the intersections across the history of aesthetics, philosophy, and the visual arts, I have also published on a diverse range of artists and subjects in the modern period. The underlying theme that unifies this research, however, is a concern with understanding the nature of the changing relation between artwork and spectator across different historical and social contexts (a topic that you will usually find filed under 'theories of spectatorship'). This focus was initially inspired by reading the work of the French art historians, Hubert Damisch and Louis Marin, who were the first in the field of art history to embrace, in creative and meaningful ways, the thinking of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. I maintain a keen interest in exploring the possibilities that arise from the encounter between art history (or the study of visual culture more broadly) and Lacanian-inspired theoretical thinking. My current research projects include:  a study of the relation between the colonial landscape art of William Hodges and the modernist New Zealand artist Colin McCahon; the changing practice of the Eucharist and the origin of perspective; and a rethinking of Australian art history after Lacan.