PhD graduate encouraged to avoid his comfort zone
“The point is to be uncomfortable, as we become more and more ourselves,” said art historian Luke Nicholson during his valedictorian speech at the fall 2011 convocation ceremony for the Faculties of Fine Arts and Engineering and Computer Science. “And to recognize that, at its best, education provides this productive discomfort that I’m talking about.”
Nicholson, who received his Doctorate of Art History, praised Concordia for allowing and encouraging him to take chances with his research. “The encouragement I have received here to do what seems outlandish to some others, to bring very different things together while respecting and cherishing those differences will serve me well, and remind me to always avoid what some would call my comfort zone,” he said.
Nicholson’s PhD thesis, entitled Anthony Blunt and Nicolas Poussin: A Queer Approach, examines affinities between 17th-century classical French painter Nicolas Poussin and noted 20th-century English art historian Anthony Blunt through the lens of queer theory.
As he explains, his project deals with historical art in a very contemporary and theoretical way. “And that’s not easy to do in a lot of places. I think it certainly makes for a more ambitious, but then also just a more unusual, project. And I think in the end, that’s much more valuable.”
Nicholson’s groundbreaking research has earned him the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal, awarded each year to the university’s top graduate student. “It came completely out of the blue, and of course it was very good news!” he said over the phone from England where he is conducting post-doctoral research.
Last fall, he was appointed as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, where he has also been teaching classes as a sessional instructor. To support his research, he was granted a post-doctoral fellowship from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Nicholson hopes to eventually turn the fruits of his labour into a book. The working title is Classicism and Difference.
During the classical era of art, Nicholson explains, many artists dealt with subjects that had ambiguous or alternative sexualities, or which dealt with racial and ethnic difference. “What I want to do with the book project is show that those tendencies in classicism originate with Poussin,” he says. “They’re found 100 or 120 years earlier."
In 2006, Nicholson received his Master's in Art History from Concordia, which dealt with the role of irony in the work of the famed Canadian modern art collaborative General Idea, both before and after the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
“To go from that to dealing with an artist like Nicholas Poussin would look like an extraordinary leap,” he says. “But in a strange way there’s a great deal of continuity because of the issues that you’re dealing with, and that’s the kind of thing which I think Concordia allows for.”
Nicholson had some words of advice for undergraduates considering pursuing research at the graduate level. First of all, he warns them against being railroaded into a particular field of research simply because it seems like the most obvious one. “I’d probably suggest taking a year off, and making sure you think about exactly why you want to do it,” he said.
It’s also important to take chances with your research, he added. “If you don’t come up with a really quite unusual project and approach, you’re probably going to end up with something which will have taken a lot of time but won’t necessarily have changed you or anything else that much.”
Related links:
• Concordia’s Department of Art History
• Anthony Blunt and Nicolas Poussin: A Queer Approach