A regular contributor to BBC1's 'Fake or Fortune?' (see MEDIA), Anthea Callen FRSA is Professor Emeritus, Australian National University, Canberra, and Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture, University of Nottingham, UK. First trained as a painter and print-maker, Callen then spent two years researching in Paris at the Sorbonne (British Institute), gaining a Research MA in Art History, followed by her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She began her academic career at the University of Warwick and has held Chairs at De Montfort University, the University of Nottingham and the Australian National University, Canberra. She has received a number of major awards and fellowships, most recently a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship. She has served on key international and national academic and scholarly bodies (see CV).

Anthea Callen is widely published and a world renowned specialist on Impressionism and the history of nineteenth-century artists’ materials and techniques. She regularly collaborates with museum conservators and curators in the study of historical materials and methods; she also serves as a professional expert for exhibitions and on specialist panels, and she appears regularly in the media. Author of nine books, she also publishes exhibition catalogue essays, book chapters, and articles in scholarly journals.

As a feminist she has long been interested in gender, sexuality and visual representation of the human body; her major new book Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body, spans the visual cultures of art and medicine to examine the modern male body, masculinity, and power c.1780 to 1920 (Yale, 2018). She considers the male gaze on the female body in The Spectacular Body: Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas, (Yale 1995), and in 1979 authored the groundbreaking book Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement, published in the USA as Women Artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Her recent book on landscape painting practice, The Work of Art: Plein air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-century France (Reaktion, 2015) is distributed in the USA by the University of Chicago Press. (see BOOKS) A frequent visiting professor, international and national speaker, Callen has given public lectures, plenary talks and research papers in Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, and Japan (see AGENDA).