ProfessorMark Ledbury

I studied Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge and then moved to study for my D.Phil at the University of Sussex under the supervision of Prof Thomas Crow.   My first academic post was as lecturer in Cultural History at the University of Portsmouth. I  moved to the University of Manchester in 1998 where I was lecturer in Art History  until I left the UK to join the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, USA,  in 2003. As Associate Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark, working under the leadership of  Michael Ann Holly, I oversaw the expansion of the research program's ambition and reach. I devised, planned and ran workshops, conferences and partnerships and worked to develop and oversee a lively residential scholars' programme.

I moved to the University of Sydney in 2011, and took up the Power Professorship in Art History. As Director of the Power Institute, I am tasked with ensuing that  the Power Institute  furthers its research and public engagement mission through talks, conferences and the support of research and publications. I help to design and curate  research-led talk  series such as Vision Cultures and the Sydney Asian Art Series, and l lead  grant-funded initiatives such as the Visual Understanding Initiative. The Power Institute is a member of RIHA and collaborates with Research Institutes internationaly. Power's activities also include  Power Publications which publishes a small but high-quality list of books on Visual Art, including the Power Polemics series, and engages with new forms of scholarly publishing in its digital projects. 

My principal  individual research interests are in the history of European art, particularly French Art, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in particular I focus on relationships between theatre and visual art and in concepts of genre in Enlightenment philosophy and aesthetics. I am committed to historically and archivally informed scholarship across disciplines and often collaborate with historians, musicologists, theatre historians and literary scholars. I have published books and studies on on Boucher, Greuze, David, and on inter-arts networks and relationships as well as on the British Artist James Northcote. I am also interested in the theory and history of art history as a discipline and mode of enquiry.  In recent years I've also contributed to books, articles and exhibitions on Australian Art. 

I have always enjoyed teaching, and  am committed to student-led and object-based teaching in Art History. I   regularly teach in the University's Chau Chak Wing Museum and lead fieldwork units in Paris to give students opportunities to see sites, monuments and artworks in situ. 

I supervise PHD and other research degrees, mostly on topics relating to Eighteenth-Century and early nineteenth-century art and culture.