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Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership - Student Profiles

 

Biography

After completing my BA at SOAS, University of London, I continued my work with Athenian artists and completed my MPhil thesis at Cambridge, focussing on reactions to the presence of documenta14, a German quinquennial art fair in Athens in 2017. 

My PhD research is aimed at situating a type of Greek tutelary school (frontistírio), visited by students to prepare for entrance exams to prestigious Fine Arts schools, within the broader landscape of images I am tentatively calling the Greek ‘image-world.’ During 18 months of fieldwork in Athens, I intend on visiting three to four of these frontistíria, as well as conversing with students and teachers online and offline, and following cultural, visual, and political events with them. Additionally, I intend on sitting the entrance exam to the Athens School of Fine Arts together with these students. I propose examining the frontistírio as a critical node within the recursive loops of the ‘image-world’, as students learn to become producers of images but also learn to attend to them critically. Living alongside images, I argue, is indicative of living historically in general, and in attending to the pedagogies of these schools I wish to find out how these students relate to images, how they experience their present historically, and what we may learn from this. 

 

Research

Anthropology of South-Eastern Europe and Greece; Art Schools and Pedagogies; Aesthetics; Affect; Media and Materiality; Modes of Historical Consciousness; Politics; Visual cultures 

Department:
 Social Anthropology
Supervisor:
 Dr Yael Navaro
College:
 Homerton
AHRC subject area:
 Art Theory and Aesthetics, Ethnography and Anthropology, Performance and Live Art, Ethics, Cultural History, Cultural Geography
Roughly Sketched: Pedagogies of Frontistíria within the Image-World of Metapolítefsi Greece
 Frederick  Schmidt

Affiliations