Conveners:
Colin Trodd (University of Sunderland) Rafael Cardoso Denis (Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

For most of the present century, 'the academy' and 'the academic' have been taken as a monolithic backdrop against which to gauge the originality of the avant-garde. The central concern of this session is to scrutinise the complex and varied structures actually erected by academies and the epistemological systems revolving around them, particularly in terms of teaching, training and professional validation. Papers will draw on historical examples throughout Britain, the rest of Europe and the Americas, focusing on issues such as: the authority of teaching; the definition of canons and the academic ideal; educational practice as an expression of stability or change; the mutation of ideas and art idioms within academic training; the dynamics of academic display and its bearing on the status of academic knowledge; the nature of academies and academicism; the tension between educational and honorific functions within academies; the institutional politics of academies and their relationship to broader social structures; the public roles of academies and their links to established structures of power and class; official and unofficial in art and education; the academy and national identity; academies as channels for the diffusion of a particular cultural vision; the international dimension of the academic system and the export of European cultural models; social groupings on the margins of academies; the development of alternative systems of artistic education outside the academy or in parallel with it; anti-academicism and its advocates.

• Paul Barlow (University of Northumbria at Newcastle): Rethinking Raphael: His Death and Transfiguration in Nineteenth-Century Art
• Gordon Fyfe (Keele University): Auditing the Royal Academy of Arts (RA): Official Discourse and the Amnesia of Institutions
• Duncan Forbes (University of Aberdeen): A 'Representation System' or the 'Demon of Democracy' the Struggle for Academic Legitimacy in Edinburgh in the 1820s
• Joe Rock (University of Edinburgh): Richard Cooper Senior and the Academy of St. Luke, Edinburgh
• Peter Quinn (University Of Sunderland): The Local Academy
• John Turpin (National College of Art and Design, Dublin): The Beginning of Fine Art Education in Ireland
• Rafael Cardoso Denis (Escola Superior De Desenho Industrial, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil): Brazil's Academia Imperial de Belas Artes and the Extension of Academicism in the Nineteenth Century
• Kathy McLauchlan (Courtauld Institute): The Academy in Rome and the Religion of Art