SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Overview

Department of the History of Art and Archaeology

Reader in the History of Art of China

Centre of Chinese Studies

Member, Centre of Chinese Studies

Name:

Dr Shane McCausland

Email address:

sm80@soas.ac.uk

Telephone:

020 7898 4705

Fax:

020 7898 4699

Address:

SOAS, University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG

Building:

Brunei Gallery

Office No:

B402

On Sabbatical:

October 2012-May 2013

Biography

An art historian, I publish mainly - but not exclusively - on the brush arts of calligraphy and painting in dynastic China: my interests range across artist workshop practices, ceramics, contemporary and Japanese art, collecting and connoisseurship, narrative art, cultural interaction, formal analysis and visual literacy.  I have published articles and monographs, notably Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai’s China (Hong Kong University Press, 2010), but have also co-authored or co-edited volumes with scholars including Stacey Pierson, Matthew McKelway, Ling Lizhong and Yin Hwang. The path to my focus on the dynamics of artistic forms and traces, on interpreting and contextualising the visual, has taken many turns. As an undergraduate at Cambridge I read Oriental Studies (Chinese) under David McMullen before working at Christie's Chinese department in London and on assignment in Hong Kong in the early 1990s. I won a scholarship to the Graduate School at Princeton University in 1993 and, moving to America and shifting into Art History with East Asian Studies, trained there under Wen C. Fong until 1999, finishing up my doctoral thesis on the art of the Chinese polymath Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) during a fellowship in the Asian Art department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Along the way I curated my first Asian art exhibition, on Chinese landscape paintings at the Art Museum, Princeton University. In 1999 I returned to the British Isles, first to a string of posts in London - as a research and teaching fellow in the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art (then still at 53 Gordon Square), as a temporary lecturer in the history of Chinese art at SOAS (2002-03) and as a research fellow in the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC), based at SOAS (2003-04). During that time much of my research was geared toward the Admonitions of the Court Instructress picture-scroll attributed to Gu Kaizhi (c. 344-c. 406) in the British Museum, the topic of a conference I organised at SOAS in 2001. Then, in 2004, I joined the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin under the directorship of Michael Ryan, where I was Curator of the East Asian Collections and later also Head of Collections. In these roles, I got involved in a wide range of exhibitions and projects, from the ASEMUS Travelling Exhibition portraiture (with a study of Louis le Brocquy's portrait head of Bono), to the Leonardo Codex Leicester and Telling Images of China: Narrative and Figure Paintings, 15th-20th Century, from the Shanghai Museum exhibitions at the Library itself.

In 2009 I returned to SOAS to a research and teaching post in the renamed Department of the History of Art and Archaeology. I tend to take one or two MPhil/PhD students a year. Because of the time limit on doctoral studies in the UK system (3 + 1 years), I prefer my doctoral students - who have come from China, Taiwan, Singapore, the UK and Europe - to have trained under me at MA level even if they already have a relevant qualification from elsewhere; I also expect them to demonstrate interest in the discipline of art history beyond the East Asia region. I serve as a member of the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). I was made Reader in the History of Art of China in 2012.

During the 2012-13 session I am on sabbatical writing a general study of culture in Mongol China under the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) for Reaktion Books. I have a fellowship at the Graduate Institute of Art History in National Taiwan University during the autumn of 2012, and then a fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the spring of 2013.