Modern art theory and practice

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Introduction
Potential research projects
Current / recent research projects
Potential supervisors
Further information

The Modern Art Theory and Practice Research Group is based in the Art History Department, which has a leading reputation for the study of modern art and is the host for the important Art in Theory research project. The group is dedicated to the study of art since the eighteenth century in its widest ramifications. Members of the group have published extensively on aspects of the history and theory of art and have particular strengths in art theory, avant-garde art, contemporary art, photography, western encounters with the ‘non-west’, gender, political aesthetics and critical theory.

Dr Steve Edwards is co-organiser of the seminar programme ‘Marxism and Culture’ at the Institute of Historical Research, and is on the editorial board of the Oxford Art Journal and Historical Materialism. In 2006 he published two books on photography: The Making of English Photography, Allegories and Photography: A Very Short Introduction. The critical study Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems was published in 2012. His forthcoming book is titled Picture Capitalism: Photographs, Property, Biography.

Paul Wood is co-editor of the documentary series Art in Theory. He is working on a forthcoming anthology Art and Theory: The West and the World and is writing a book, Cultural Encounters, on the relationship between Western and ‘non-Western’ art.

Professor Gill Perry has an interest in art and gender issues. Her books include: Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde (1995); Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art and Theatre 1768–1820 (2007) and the edited collection Difference & Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women's Practice (2004).

Dr Leon Wainwright is a member of the editorial board of the journal Third Text, and the OU Principal Investigator of the research project Creativity and Innovation in a World of Movement (CIM), funded by the European Science Foundation. He is co-editor, with Paul Wood, of the next volume in the Art in Theory series, and author of Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester University Press, 2011).

We welcome applications in areas which correspond to current staff research interests. We look for detailed and well thought-out proposals, which set out specific research questions and outline the originality of your topic or approach. If you would like to discuss your ideas informally before submitting an application, please contact the department.

Qualifications available:: PhD or MPhil
Fees:: For detailed information on current fees visit Fees and funding.
Entry requirements:: Minimum 2:1 (or equivalent)

Potential research projects

The group welcomes enquiries from students interested in research projects in these or related areas.

Current / recent research projects

The Marketing of Contemporary British Art, 1975–1990
Elusive Translation: Film and Video in the work of Isaac Julien, Zineb Sedira and Alia Syed
Materialist concepts of abstraction, and their British reception
Modern Gothic
The Commodification of the Celebrity Portrait: an analysis of photographic business. practice in relation to image mass production in London, c.1855–1865
Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau
Art, Writing and Autobiography
Growing up with Modernité: Representations of Childhood and Adolescence in French Painting, 1848–1886
Italian Communist Party Cultural Policies during the Post-war Period, 1944–1951
Modernist and Street Painting in Kumasi, 1950–2000
American Art Criticism and the Crisis of Art History Writing, 1962–1967
Patrick White, Peter Carey and Sidney Nolan: National Myths in Australian Literature and Painting

Potential supervisors

Dr Steve Edwards - History and theory of photography; modern and contemporary art; critical theory and political aesthetics.
Professor Gill Perry - Modern and contemporary art; eighteenth-century British art, especially portraiture; art and gender.
Dr Leon Wainwright - Modern and contemporary art; transatlantic exchanges, diasporas and migration, connecting Britain, North America, and the Caribbean; critical theory and phenomenology.
Mr Paul Wood - Modernism; modern and contemporary art; art and theory; cross-cultural influences in Western and ‘non-Western’ art.