Dr. W.J.L.M. (Wilfried) van Damme

Position:
  • Lecturer
Expertise:
  • Art history


Telephone number: +31 (0)71 527 1746
E-Mail: w.van.damme@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Faculty / Department: Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen, Institute for Cultural Disciplines, KG Moderne beeldende kunst
Office Address: Johan Huizingagebouw
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden
Room number 2.22


Fields of interest

- world aesthetics
- world art studies
- the anthropology of aesthetics
- the anthropology of art
- the historiography of the Western study of art and aesthetics outside the West
 

Research

Wilfried van Damme’s initial interests in African conceptions of beauty and ugliness have eventually led him to develop a systematic anthropological approach to aesthetics (empirical, contextual, and intercultural comparative). In the ongoing attempt to understand the place of the aesthetic in human existence, he now also incorporates bio-evolutionary perspectives and is interested in the reflections on aesthetics offered by various systems of thought in time and space. For the last few years, his focus has been on world art studies: the global and multidisciplinary study of visual artistic phenomena. Van Damme’s present research includes the historiography of the Western scholarly interest in art and aesthetics outside the West.

Curriculum Vitae

Wilfried van Damme (Hulst, 1960) studied Art History and Archaeology at the University of Ghent and holds a postgraduate degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Leuven. He obtained his PhD from the University of Ghent in 1993, with a dissertation outlining an anthropological approach to aesthetics. Van Damme has been a lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities since 2004. He was a Visiting Fellow at the University of East Anglia (2000) and a Visiting Professor at Ghent Univerity (2005-2008), where he still teaches. In 2010 he was appointed extraordinary professor at Tilburg University, on a chair endowed by the Treub Foundation for Tropical Reseach.

Publications

World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008 (ed., with Kitty Zijlmans)

World Aesthetics: Biology, Culture, and Reflection. Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art, ed. John Onians, pp. 151-87. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Anthropologies of Art, International Journal of Anthropology 18 (4): 231-44, 2003.

Universality and Cultural Particularity in Visual Aesthetics. Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Neil Roughley, pp. 258-83. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000.

Beauty in Context: Towards an Anthropological Approach to Aesthetics. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996.

Last Modified: 06-10-2010