Research Areas
John Webley recently completed his PhD in Art History and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. His dissertation, Ink, Paint, and Blood: India and the Great Game in Russian Culture, offers a transmedial account of how Russian artists, writers, and collectors engaged with British imperial visions of India through painting, literature, and material culture. While adapting this work into a monograph, John is also co-editing the volume Fragile Matters: Material Culture and the Russian Empire, which grows out of the 2024 Yale conference Fragile Things: Material Culture and the Russian Empire that he co-organized. His research is grounded in extensive archival and collections work in Britain, France, Finland, India, and Russia, supported by awards such as the Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the SHERA Graduate Scholar Research Grant, and fellowships from Yale’s MacMillan Center. He combines this scholarly focus with curatorial and provenance experience at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dahesh Museum of Art, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, where he has contributed to projects on Russian and Ukrainian painting, provenance research, and Fabergé and other Russian decorative arts.
- ARTH 11A & 12A C&I: Art & Empire: Russian and Soviet Global Encounters
- ARTH 153 Tradition and Change in Native American Art: California and the Pacific Northwest
J. Webley, “Face Off: A Russian Prince at the Courts of India.” In Routledge Companion to Art and the Formation of Empire. Eds. Emily Burns and Alice M. Rudy Price (London: Routledge, 2025)
J. Webley, “The Orient Estranged: Vasilii Vereshchagin’s Blowing from Guns in British India.” In Russian Orientalism in a Global Context. Eds. Maria Taroutina and Allison Leigh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023)