Douglas Fordham

Candidate statement

Douglas Fordham is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia and the Director of Graduate Studies for the PhD Program in Art and Architectural History. He is a co-editor of Art and the British Empire (Manchester UP 2007, winner of the Historians of British Art book prize) and British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (UPenn, 2010). His most recent book, Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire was published by Yale University Press this year. The book examines how a tonal, and often hand-colored, print medium shaped the representation of global travel and colonization between 1770 and 1820. Fordham has been a fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, the Folger Library, the Rare Book School, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He recently completed a Mellon Fellowship for Indigenous Arts at the University of Virginia where he integrated collections and histories of Australasian indigenous arts into courses on the eighteenth-century and British art. He served on the ASECS Board as a Member-at-Large in 2018-19, and he served on the advisory boards of Literature Compass and Eighteenth-Century Studies. Having benefited in countless ways from the collaborations and friendships that ASECS helped to make possible, Douglas would like to expand the number of young scholars in the Society and encourage the participation of scholars from a wide array of disciplinary and geographic specializations.