Academic
Positions

Academic Positions (Permanent and Temporary)

Visiting Professor of History of Art

The Courtauld Institute of Art

2024 - Present

Leonard A. Lauder Distinguished Scholar

Lauder Center for Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

April - May 2025

‘Fields of the Future’ Visiting Research Fellow

Bard Graduate Centre, New York

2024

Pevsner Professor of History of Art

Birkbeck, University of London

1986 - 2023

Moore Distinguished Professor, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences

California Institute of Technology.

2017

Visiting Professor of History of Art

Gresham College, London

2013 - 2014

Summer School Tutor, 'Modern Art and Modernism'

Open University

1983 - 1986

Lecturer in the History and Theory of Art

University of Kent

1983 - 1984

Lecturer, Department of History of Art

University of Leicester

1982 - 1983

Lecturer in the History and Theory of Art

Eliot College, University of Kent

1981 - 1982

Cultural Collaborations

The Fallen Woman

Curator of the exhibition, ‘The Fallen Woman’, at the Foundling Museum, London, 25 September 2015 – 3 January 2016.

An exhibition of paintings, prints and photographs, alongside archive materials from the nineteenth-century Foundling Hospital, with a specially-commissioned sound installation using the words of the Foundling mothers. The exhibition produced the highest visitor numbers for an exhibition at the Foundling Museum.

Frederick Walker, ‘The Lost Path’, 1863 © The Makins Collection

Victoriana

Collaborator with Sonia Solicari, Curator of Paintings at the Guildhall Art Gallery, on the academic programme (conference, symposium and film series) to accompany the exhibition ‘Victoriana’, held in autumn 2013

Yumiko Utsu, 'Octopus Portrait' (2009). Copyright the artist. Image courtesy of Michael Hoppen Contemporary and GP Gallery

Research Grants and Awards

The Leverhulme Trust

2022 - Research Fellowship for writing Paul Mellon Lectures (2023) and completing book manuscript.

2012 - Research Fellowship for The Tiger in the Smoke

2007 - Visiting Professor grant for Professor Angela Dalle Vacche to visit School of History of Art and Visual Media at Birkbeck for Spring and Summer Terms

2001 - three-year Major Research Fellowship for work on The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900

1989 - for study leave during the academic session 1989-90 for work on The Female Nude

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

2019 - Senior Fellowship for research on ‘British Blonde: Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain’

Arts and Humanities Research Council

2015 - 10th Anniversary Cultural Engagement’ grant for the film ‘The Fallen Woman: Film, Archive, Afterlife’

Birkbeck College (Research Committee)

1996 - For work on 'Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London'

The British Academy

1995 - Research Leave Scheme award for spring 1997 for work on Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London'

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College Art Association Foreign / Interdisciplinary Travel Grant

1995 - To deliver a paper at the College Art Association Annual Conference in Boston, USA.

Conference Organisation

Co-organiser with Steven Connor of international conference on 'Cultural Value'
Birkbeck College, London

Co-organiser with Kathy Adler of symposium on `La France: Allegories of Womanhood in Post-Revolutionary France'
Birkbeck College, London

Co-organiser with Laura Marcus of international conference on `Walter Benjamin 1892-1940'
With funding from Goethe Institute London, German Academic Exchange Service and the British Academy
University College London

Co-organiser with Costas Douzinas of international conference on `The Art of Justice'
Tate Gallery, London

Co-organiser with Patrizia di Bello of academic session on ‘Photography: History, Theory, Practice’
Association of Art Historians Annual Conference, London

Co-organiser with Frank Mort of international conference on ‘The Metropolitan Pleasure Economy’
Birkbeck College, London

Co-organiser with Jennifer Tucker of conference on ‘Law and Photography’
Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities and London School of Economics

Co-organiser with Mark Hallett of ‘The Big Screen: British Art History and Cinema’
Association of Art History Annual Conference