TERTIARY EDUCATION
2021 Certificate IV in Training and Assessment at Adelaide TAFE.
2017 Awarded PhD in Art History from the University of Adelaide. Thesis title: Beings of Nature and Reason: Mythological Masculinities in 18th-Century French Art and Visual Culture. Supervisors: Professor David Lemmings and Dr Lisa Mansfield.
2010 PhD candidate, Art History in the School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide.
2008 Awarded Master’s degree in Art History, University of Adelaide. Thesis title: Wayward Wives and Deviant Mistresses: François Boucher’s Mythological Women of the Rococo. Supervisor: Dr Lisa Mansfield.
2007 Graduate Diploma in Art History, University of Adelaide. Subjects included Indigenous Art; Modern Art; Australian Art; and European Art since the Renaissance.
1998 Certificate IV in Small Business Management, Salisbury Institute of TAFE.
1993-1997 Advanced Diploma in Applied and Visual Art, North Adelaide School of Art.
ACADEMIC SERVICE
2022 Lecturer, Drawing and Art History and Theory, Adelaide College of Arts; Lecturer in Art History (Censors, Vandals and Iconoclasts) at the Adelaide Central School of Art; Visiting Research Fellow, The University of Adelaide.
2021 Acting Course Co-ordinator and Lecturer, Art in the Age of Enlightenment and Introduction to Art History and Visual Culture, University of Adelaide.
2020 Lecturer and Course Co-ordinator, Art Censorship, University of Adelaide. Tutor, Renaissance Art in Northern Europe.
2019 Tutor, Introduction to Art History and Visual Culture; Course Coordinator and Lecturer, Art in the Age of Enlightenment, University of Adelaide.
State Representative for South Australia, AAANZ (The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand)
2018 Course Coordinator and Lecturer in Art History, University of Adelaide. Subjects – Art against Society: Censorship and Iconoclasm; Portraiture and Power.
2017 Promotions Officer, Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Committee member, AHCAN (Art History and Curatorial Alumni Network).
2014 – 2017 Postgraduate Representative, ANZECS (Australian and New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies).
2013 – 2021 Committee member, Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (University of Western Australia).
2010 Administration assistant, AAANZ Tradition and Transformation Conference, Adelaide.
2009-2016 Casual tutor in Art History at the University of Adelaide.
GRANTS, AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS
2017 – current Visiting Research Fellow, Faculty of Arts, The University of Adelaide.
2017 Early Career Researcher Travel Award, Sydney Intellectual History Network, The University of Sydney
2010 Recipient of the Australian Postgraduate Award until 2013 (Higher Degree by Research).
2009 Department for Environment and Heritage South Australian Built Heritage Research Fellowship 2009/2010 at the Architecture Museum, School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia.
PUBLICATIONS
2022 ‘Meeting the Locals: Mythical Images of the Indigenous Other in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,’ in eds. Jennifer Milam and Nicola Parsons, Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century, University of Delaware Press.
2020 ‘‘Ilm: Science, Religion and Art in Islam,’ (Book review), The Journal of the Asian Arts Society. TAASA Review, Special issue: Islamic Art in Australia. Vol.29 No.3, September 2020, 27.
2016 ‘Review: Rococo Echo: Art, History and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola,’ Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 3 (2016). http://openjournals.arts.uwa.edu.au/index.php/cerae/article/view/105/
2013 ‘The Horror of the Horns: Pan’s Attempted Rape of Syrinx in Early Eighteenth-Century Visual Art’, in ed. Anne Greenfield, Interpreting Sexual Violence, 1660-1800 (London and Vermont: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 163-175.
2010 Harold T Griggs: The People’s Architect, Architecture Museum Monograph Series04. (School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia, 2010).
Credenza Credentials, catalogue essay, JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design.
INVITED TALKS
2022 ‘Fears, hopes and desires’: an eighteenth-century approach to Fantastical Worlds, The David Roche Foundation Museum, Adelaide
2021 ‘Fragonard, Shonibare and the subversive aesthetics of excess,’ Art History Masterclass: Dialogues with Art Across Time and Place, University of Adelaide.
2020 “Flowers, Empire and the Visualisation of Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century,” The David Roche Foundation Museum, Adelaide.
CONFERENCE PAPERS
2019 “Cruel Natures: Eighteenth-Century Representations of Violence and Punishment in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Nature and Culture in Early Modernity. New Approaches to Landscape History, CAMEA (Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture) International Workshop, 4 October 2019, University of Adelaide.
2017 “Marsyas Flayed by the Order of Apollo: Unruly Noise and the Triumph of Culture,’ Natures and Spaces of Enlightenment, 16th David Nichol Smith Seminar and Conference of the Australia and New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Griffith University and the University of Queensland.
‘Divine Inebriation: Adopting the Guise of Bacchus in the Eighteenth Century,’ Deviant Thinking: Early Modern Philosophy and the Enlightenment, University of Sydney.
2015 ‘Looking From Behind: The Pleasurable Perils of Viewing the Eighteenth-century Nude’, Transgressions Conference, Postgraduate Gender and Sexuality Studies. Flinders University, South Australia.
2014 ‘The Pretended Satyr. Joseph-François Lafitau’s Moeurs des sauvages amériquains compares aux moeurs premiers temps’, Ideas and Enlightenment. The Long Eighteenth Century, David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies XV. University of Sydney, New South Wales.
2013 ‘The Censured Touch (Part I)’, AAANZ Inter-Discipline Conference, Melbourne, Victoria. Panel: Consumption and Interdiction.
2011 ‘The Satyr’s Howl: Charles-Andre Van Loo’s Apollo Flaying Marsyas’, 14th David Nichol Smith Conference, Melbourne, Victoria. Panel: Sensibilities and Sociabilities: Emoted.
2010 Participation and short presentation of work in progress at the Postgraduate Workshop, AAANZ Tradition and Transformation Conference, Adelaide.
PROJECTS
2014 Guest curator for Twitter account @WetheHumanities.
MEMBERSHIPS
AAANZ The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand
ANZECS Australian and New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
AHCAN Art History and Curatorial Alumni Network
Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
melanie cooper 