Kathryn Barush

I recently completed a D.Phil (Ph.D) at the University of Oxford and am currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Prior to commencing graduate work, I had the opportunity to pursue a comparative study of painting and pilgrimage in the Buddhist and Christian traditions with the generous support of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. I conducted field research over the course of a year in working scriptoria and archives in the U.K., Tibet, India, and Greece.

My current work examines the intersections of the concept of pilgrimage and the visual imagination in Britain from the years 1790 to 1850. Historically, distinctions between understandings of pilgrimage as motif, metaphor, artistic process, and actual journey have been blurred to varying degrees, resulting in the creation of images that were at once narratives, memorials, and stimuli for contemplative journeys from pictorial space to imagination.

In drawing out the various levels at which pilgrimage engaged the visual imagination in the first half of the nineteenth century, the study offers a detailed perspective on the conjunction of content, form, meaning, and process for artists and theorists, as notions of the transfer of ‘spirit’ from sacred space to represented space re-emerged as a key aspect of the theological and artistic discourse of the period. I contend that pilgrimage, both in practice and as a form of mental contemplation, helped to shape the religious, literary, and artistic imagination of the period and beyond.

The thesis is positioned primarily as a contribution to the field of art history, where the theme of traditional pilgrimage provides a new interpretive angle. Beyond this, it furthers studies of the cultural and religious history of Britain by tracing a common enterprise and conceptual framework - that of spiritual journey – across a variety of systems of religious belief. It also, therefore, presents a historiographical critique of both secularist and denominational assumptions in literary criticism, cultural anthropology and art historical studies of the period.

My doctoral research benefited from the support of a Leverhulme Studentship, where I worked on a team researching, coding and annotating a fully-searchable on-line edition of the diary of British philosopher William Godwin. In 2012 the project was awarded 'best digital resource' by the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.

In addition to research on pilgrimage and visual culture, I am also broadly interested in digital preservation and archiving initiatives.