In this guest lecture, Prof. Juliet Simpson, DPhil. (Warburg Institute, London) sheds light on a story of hidden temporalities of art, design and culture in early 1900s Vienna. Following the landmark Gothic Modern exhibition, and to inaugurate a new collaboration with the University of Vienna, Prof. Simpson unveils hidden artist actors and secret counter-cultural imaginaries of the medieval in Vienna's pivotal sites of art and cultural modernity. Her lecture explores the potency of the Gothic to navigate porous, uncanny interactions of art, history, memory, gender and identities of culture in key Viennese modernisms. Entangling pathos and desire, she illuminates how the medieval re-imagined becomes a new creative site for Vienna's unseen artistic modernisms, entwining past and future, emotion and revelation.
Shortbio
Juliet Simpson, DPhil. (Oxon), is Full Professor and Associate Fellow of Art History and Cultural Memory at The Warburg Institute, University of London. She is a leading international authority in long nineteenth and early-twentieth-century art and visual culture, fin-de-siècle art and cultural memory; the afterlives of Gothic and Renaissance art; uncanny modernities, art and the emotions, and curation. She was Principal Investigator and Lead Curator for the acclaimed international exhibition, Gothic Modern - From Darkness to Light (Helsinki-Oslo-Vienna, 2024-2026). Recent publications include her co-authored book with Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, Gothic Modern - From Edvard Munch to Käthe Kollwitz (Hirmer-University of Chicago Press, 2024); 'The Unseen Modernities of Marianne Stokes' (Brepols, 2026), 'James Ensor's Liminal Gothic Urban', NCAW (2026) and forthcoming book, Veiled Cities - Haunted Urban Realities in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Art, Architecture and Visual Arts (2027-8). Professor Simpson has held major awards and fellowships as Royal Netherlands Academy Visiting Full Professor at the University of Amsterdam, Université Libre de Bruxelles, and Fellowships at Wolfson College, Oxford, Warburg Institute, London and the University of Heidelberg. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Royal Historical Society, UK and sits on the international editorial board of Women and Gender in the Arts (Brepols), and the arts panel for the Research Council of Finland.
