About

Lynda Nead is an art historian, writer, critic and broadcaster. She is currently a Visiting Professor of History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, having previously been Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London.

She has published widely on the history of British art and culture and on gender, sexuality, the city and visual representation. Lynda's approach to visual images is interdisciplinary, examining art in its historical and social contexts and in relation to other visual media in the period. She has written several books, which can be viewed in detail here.

Her latest book, British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Postwar Britain, which includes material delivered as the Paul Mellon Lectures at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2023, will be published by Yale UP for the Paul Mellon Centre in autumn 2025. She is currently working on a book on the 1947 British film It Always Rains on Sunday, for the British Film Institute Film Classics series, published by Bloomsbury Press.

Lynda is a Fellow (and Member of Council) of the British Academy (FBA), the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS) and of the Academy of Europe (MAE). In 2021, she was made a Fellow of the Association for Art History (AAH). She has had a number of governance roles in British museums and art galleries, including Trustee of the Victoria & Albert Museum and is currently a Trustee of the Holburne Museum in Bath and of Campaign for the Arts, a lobbying group that champions widening access to the arts and culture.

Lynda has contributed to a number of arts documentaries on the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky Arts and is a regular contributor to arts programmes on BBC radio, such as Front Row and Free Thinking.