AAANZ 2023 Conference | Keynote Speakers

Hanneke Grootenboer (Wednesday 6 December)

Hanneke Grootenboer is Professor and Chair of Art History at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Prior, she was Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford, where between 2014 and 2016 she served as the Head of the Ruskin School of Art. Her scholarship focuses on intersections between early modern art, literature and philosophy from a transhistorical perspective, and addresses topics such as intimacy, interiority, silence, affect and miniaturization. Her recent publications include the co-authored Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe (Princeton UP, 2021, paperback 2023) and The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking (Chicago UP, 2021, paperback 2023).   She is currently working on a book on art, craft and thought.

Aruna D’Souza (Friday 8 December)

Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, and she is a contributor to The New York Times. Her writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Art News, Garage, Bookforum, Frieze, Momus, Art in America, and Art Practical, among other places, as well as in numerous artist’s monographs and museum exhibition catalogues. Her book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited), was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. Recent editorial project include Linda Nochlin’s Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now (Thames & Hudson, 2022) and Lorraine O’Grady’s Writing in Space 1973-2018 (Duke University Press, 2020); she co-curated the retrospective of O’Grady’s work, Both/And, that opened in March 2021 at the Brooklyn Museum. She is the recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for art journalism and a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant, and delivered the Distinguished Critics Lecture for AICA (the International Association of Art Critics) in 2019. She was appointed the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art in 2022, and the W.W. Corcoran Professor of Social Engagement at the Corcoran School of Art, George Washington University, in 2022-2023.