Dr Jennifer Johnson is a research fellow in History of Art at St John’s College, Oxford. She has a background in both art history and English literature, and has held teaching positions in both subjects. Her work on gesture arose from questions of materiality in painting – specifically, the wielding of thick paint in early twentieth-century painting in France and Britain. Her first book, Georges Rouault and Material Imagining, was an extended study of the way in which matter, process, and gesture intersect with philosophy, theology, and aesthetics in avant-garde art. Jennifer has also published on Alfred Jarry and the influence of Ubu Roi on the avant-garde, particularly the use of the puppet as an elevated form of bodily gestural expression. She is currently working on a book on abstraction and alienation in post-war painting in Britain – including the work of Prunella Clough, Sandra Blow, and Ann Quin. This book develops the idea of gesture as something thwarted in particular forms of abstraction, and develops a theory of dis-affect.

Rachel is the Graham Robertson Research Fellow at Downing College. She completed her D.Phil in History of Art at St John's College, Oxford in early 2023, and holds a BA in Music from Christ Church, Oxford. She has held teaching positions in History of Art at the University of Oxford, and been a Junior Teaching Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum.

Rachel specializes in the visual and musical culture of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century France. Her broader research interests lie in the interrelationships between the visual arts and music, the role of these arts within collective and cultural memory, and the ways in which the practice of these arts is informed by religion and politics. Increasingly, she is turning towards questions of gestural expression in her considersation of these themes. She has published on the theatricality of the pochoir print and on the 'sounding body' in fin-de-siecle sheet music illustrations. 

She is the co-founder of the ECR French Nienteenth-Century Art Network.

T. F. Coombes is a Lecturer in Music at St Hugh’s College and Exeter College, University of Oxford. He is primarily a cultural historian of music in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, with particular interests in questions concerning childhood, dance and embodiment. His research has been published in journals including Cambridge Opera Journal, Music & Letters, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. He is currently preparing a monograph on the significance of music for the cultural history of childhood in France between 1870 and 1925.

Mark Rowan-Hull (born 1968) is a British synaesthete performance and visual artist. He is known for creating original works of art accompanied by musicians in front of a live audience.

Rowan-Hull is also a lecturer and was a Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 2009-2012 and is a lifelong member of the University of Oxford. His work is included in collections at St Hugh's College, Wolfson College and Linacre College.