Robert Frederick Blum, ‘Two Dutch Girls Having Coffee’ (1885), watercolour and white gouache over pencil on paper, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Image in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
PhD student Christiane Matt reflects on the meaning of Synchronicity and its relationship to the events hosted by the History of Art PhD community in the academic year 2020/2021.
Reflections on Synchronicity:
As the academic year 2020/2021 draws to a close, it seems a fitting moment for reflection. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the word ‘unprecedented’ has become so overused that it has lost nearly all its meaning. It has been a challenging year for all of us and even now, there are still countless obstacles and disruptions to academic life and research. Events and conferences are still being held on the ubiquitous platform of Zoom, and we have become all too familiar with working remotely and recording our lectures and seminars on Panopto.
However, not everything is doom and gloom. Sometimes I wonder if the organisers of the first Synchronicity colloquium had an inkling of what was to come when they set up the event. While no-one could have predicted the series of events that resulted in the outbreak of the global Covid-19 pandemic, the title Synchronicity is particularly fitting for our current times. Defined by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) as a series of events which coincide in time and which appear meaningfully related, but have no causal relation, the phenomenon of synchronicity lends its name to the PhD colloquium in our department. In the last year, much has been said and written about synchronous and asynchronous online learning, and those of us who have been working as Graduate Teaching Assistants for the department have made our own experiences with those new modes of teaching and learning.
Synchronicity, however, is more than just that. The concept denotes events which are meaningfully related. As a result of the pandemic, we have had to rethink not only our modes of learning and teaching, but also our entire social lives. During the lockdown of summer 2020, what had started as a series of informal online get-togethers between some of the members of the PhD community, first conducted on Google Hangouts, crystallised into what is now known as the History of Art Postgraduate Café. Previously, we had been able to meet our fellow postgraduate students at research seminars or the annual PhD conference, but as the lockdown dragged on and we were confined to our homes for month after month, many of us started feeling isolated from our community.
Isolation is not something completely alien to the PhD researcher, as we all spend many solitary hours conducting research in libraries and archives. At the same time, however, community is an integral part of academic life. It is through seminar discussions, paper presentations, and reading groups that we explore new ideas, exchange feedback and get to know future collaborators and colleagues. Out of this community spirit, the History of Art Postgraduate Café was born. The first few sessions were of a free-form format, allowing members of the postgraduate community to share their research successes as well as their worries and anxieties. At the start of the new academic year, we welcomed the new first-year PhD students and provided them with an opportunity to introduce themselves and their research to each other.
The beginning of the spring term, as well as a new lockdown, saw many structural changes to the Postgraduate Café. Sessions were now taking place on Zoom, which had become the preferred platform for online events. Over the last months of 2020, Freya Cox, the course representative of the MA cohort, and myself, had devised a programme of themed sessions centred around current discussions and themes in the field of art history. We hosted a session on public monuments and marked LGBTQ+ History Month with a session focused on the art and experiences of LGBTQ+ artists (the full programme can be found here). During these sessions, postgraduate students of all levels of study came together to debate and reflect on current issues, not only in our field, but also in wider society. Different perspectives were shared and many of us found like-minded people, even friends, through these fortnightly events. The Postgraduate Café culminated with a last session in summer term centred around the topic of careers. This event was devised in true collaborative fashion with Dr Nicola Sinclair, Janice Simpson and Kate Morris from Careers and Placements. We also welcomed two guest speakers from our own community, Megan Henvey and Murray Tremellen, who shared their insights into the world of work with the attendees. Without the labour of love of everyone involved in the organisation of this event, putting this event together would not have been possible. However, it is not only due to the hard work of the organisers that this series of events became so successful, it is also due to the continued support of the postgraduate community at York, who have shown an incredible amount of resourcefulness and resilience during the past year.
My thanks go to Dr Cordula van Wyhe, Dr Hanna Vorholt for their unwavering support and to Freya Cox, who has been a dedicated co-host and moderator of the History of Art Postgraduate Café. Thanks to Freya, we were able to foster conversation between our MA and PhD cohorts and we were able to build a strong community across all levels of postgraduate study.
