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About the Team

Professor Isabella Alexander

Chief Investigator

The majority of Isabella’s scholarship has sought to excavate the history of copyright law in 18th and 19th century Britain and Australia. She became interested in the history of copyright and the visual arts via her project on the history of copyright and maps. That project explored how copyright law came to be applied to maps, and to regulate the creation, circulation, and use of geographic information. In the course of that research, Isabella realised how little historical and archival work had been done on the history of art and copyright and, together with Cristina S. Martinez, decided to investigate this further. They pooled our resources to publish a chapter on Elizabeth Blackwell, the botanical artist who brought the first copyright case under the Engravings Act 1735, and an article on 18th century copyright litigation over a map game. She is excited to join forces with the other researchers on this project so that they can continue to explore the connections between art, law, and technology into the present day in an even more interdisciplinary way.

Dr Andrea Wallace

Partner Investigator

Andrea’s research focuses on the intersections of art and cultural heritage law with the digital realm and digital heritage management. She works across multiple disciplines and specialties including intellectual property law, art and cultural heritage law, digital humanities, visual studies, and museum studies. Her wider interdisciplinary interests consider the impact of digital technologies on the presentation, interpretation, and dissemination of cultural heritage and data. She frequently writes and presents on topics related to open GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums).

Andrea’s work on the project explores how digital surrogates of public domain works have been published by heritage institutions under new rights claims, open access frameworks, or to the public domain. She is especially interested in the afterlife of digital surrogates as they circulate online, multiply and (re)appear in new contexts, and transform into new communications nodes in a global information society. She is studying digitization practices around William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress and collaborating on an exhibition that reimagines copyright for visual artworks and reproductions at the turn of the 21st century.

Dr Stina Teilmann-Lock

Partner Investigator

Stina’s research revolves around issues of design and intellectual property management, management education and new technologies. She is particularly interested in historicizing and situating notions and practices of intellectual property in design considering diverse historical, social, technological and regional contexts and their implications for strategy. Furthermore, Stina researches and writes on business school education.

Stina’s contribution to Hacking Copyright in the 21st Century: Art, Law & Technology focuses on developing new methods for doing interdisciplinary research and for training tech savvy future lawyers and legally astute managers.

Dr Cristina S. Martinez

Partner Investigator

Cristina is an art historian who focuses on eighteenth-century British art, the history of copyright and encounters between art and law. She is the official biographer for the entry on Jane Hogarth in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Cristina’s ongoing work on this eighteenth-century printseller – which features her legal and commercial achievements during and after the death of her husband the painter and engraver William Hogarth – has won the 2020 Emilie Du Chatelet Award. She is also co-editor (with Cynthia Roman) of Female Printmakers, Printsellers and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women in Graphic Media ca 1700 -1830 forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Oxford-Bodleian Library, the Francis Haskell Memorial Fund, the Terra Foundation for the Arts, the Yale Center for British Art and the Lewis Walpole Library. In 2018, she was the inaugural fellow at the Wilhelm Busch - Deutsches Museum für Karikatur und Zeichenkunst and, in 2021, she curated with Ian Haywood its exhibition Queen Caroline and King George: Sex, Celebrity and Royal Scandal, 1820-21 (currently on view).

Cristina is thrilled to be working with Andrea, Cynthia, Isabella, Leo and Stina on the connections between law, technology and creative production, and in particular questions pertaining to the appeal and wide circulation of William Hogarth’s works – copied, imitated and appropriated then and now.

Dr Cynthia Roman

Partner Investigator

Cynthia Roman is an art historian and curator of eighteenth-century British art. Her scholarship focuses on the production, circulation and collecting of prints, especially graphic satire. Her works extends to inquiries around collecting copies, the practice of copying in the education of professional and non-professional artists, the associative power of copies that continue to prompt a ubiquity of appropriations and parodies and related matters of invention and quality. Cynthia has published and presented widely on graphic satire, collecting history and the work of non-professional artists. In addition to many articles and essays, she has been editor, co-editor and contributor to several book projects including Hogarth’s Legacy (2016); Enduring Presence. William Hogarth’s British and European Afterlives with Caroline Patey and Georges Letissier (2021); Staging The Mysterious Mother with Jill Campbell and Jonathan Kramnick (forthcoming 2023); and Female Printmakers, Publishers and Printsellers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women in Graphic Media, ca. 1700 -1830 with Cristina S. Martinez (forthcoming 2024). She is honoured to be part of the ArTechLaw research team’s cross-disciplinary investigations into the complex and nuanced dynamics of copyright law for the protection of artistic property against the competing significant cultural currency of copying in the visual arts that has long carried meaning across centuries and geographies.

Dr Leonardo Impett

Partner Investigator

Dr Leonardo Impett is a University Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities and convenor of the MPhil in Digital Humanities. He was previously Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Durham University. Leonardo has a background in information engineering and machine learning, having worked or studied at the Cambridge Machine Learning Lab, the Cambridge Computer Lab’s Rainbow Group, and Microsoft Research Cairo. His Ph.D., with Sabine Süsstrunk and Franco Moretti at EPFL, was on the use of computer vision for the “distant reading” of the history of art. In 2018 Leonardo was a DH fellow at Villa I Tatti – the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, from 2018-2020 he was Scientific Assistant, then Scientist, at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. Alongside his research in digital art history, he frequently works with machine learning in arts and culture, including for the Liverpool Biennial, the Royal Opera House, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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