Professor Stephen Barber is Professor of Visual and Material Culture, Co-Director of Centre. His research interests are in contemporary urban cultures, experimental film and performance art, and Japanese culture.
Professor Fran Lloyd is Professor of Art History, Co-Director of Centre. Her research interests are in émigré artists in post-war Britain, transnational encounters, sculpture and performance.
Dr Natasha Adamou is an art historian researching the use of everyday, found objects in contemporary sculpture in the context of the material culture of post-industrial cities.
Dr Alice Beard is Senior Lecturer in Design History with a research focus on fashion media and the intersections between fashion, design, text and photography.
Dr Jonathan Black is Senior Research Fellow in Art History and has published widely on British art and culture of the First World War and the inter-war period, and public sculpture.
Dr Will Brooker is Professor of Film and Cultural Studies. His research explores changing meanings of cultural icons across different historical and cultural contexts.
Professor David Cottington is Professor of Modern Art History and has published widely on Cubism and the histories and theories of avant-garde formations in Europe.
Dr Azadeh Fatehrad is a postdoctoral researcher and curator. Her interdisciplinary practice-based and historical research engages with postcolonial feminism, the archive and re-presentation.
Dr Irene González-López is a postdoctoral researcher. Irene's main research interests are Japanese culture and cinema, audiovisual art forms, gender studies, and stardom.
Dr Maggie Gray is an art historian whose research focuses on the aesthetics and politics of comics. Her monograph Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance, and Dissent is forthcoming from Palgrave.
Dr Lina Hakim is Lecturer in Visual and Material Culture with a research focus on the overlaps between the material cultures of science, technology, craft, and play.
Dr Chris Horrocks is an Associate Professor who publishes widely on art and cultural theory and is a documentary filmmaker with the film production group hijack.
Dr Kathy Kubicki is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies. Her research focuses on contemporary art, photography, film and video.
Dr Janice Miller is Head of Department of Critical and Historical Studies. Her research focuses on fashion, embodiment and performance. She is currently working on her second monograph, which explores the cultural and material significance of makeup.
Helen Potkin is Principal Lecturer and carries out research on performance, the public, and practices outside of the gallery.
Dr. Jana Scholze is Associate Professor, Course Director of the MA Curating Contemporary Design and Co-ordinator for Postgraduate Research for the School of Critical Studies and Creative Industries. Her research focuses on theory and practice in curating and contemporary design.
Dr Sarah Thomas is Lecturer in Art History & Museum Studies, a curator and researcher with particular interest in the colonial and post-colonial art of Britain and its former colonies.
Portia Ungley is a lecturer in art and design history with research interests modern and contemporary material culture.
Dr Helen Wickstead is a Senior Lecturer in Museums, Galleries and Heritage. Her archaeological research explores the relationships between modernity and prehistory, aerial photography, and mapping technologies.
Visiting Professors and Associate Researchers
Professor Marta Braun
Professor Rebecca Jennison
Stephen Herbert, Senior Research Fellow
Dr Robert Knifton
Dr Soni Kum
Dr Alice Planel
Dr Dawn Peirera
Dr Alex Reynolds
Dr Yoshiko Shimada
Toyoko Ito, Research Associate
Research Students
Current research students
Mahshad Afshar – Women on both side of the Camera: Representations of Women in Iranian Cinema by Women Filmmakers
Ben Angwin – A Problem of Place: (Re)Locating The Omega Workshops into the Modernist Field of Artistic and Cultural Production
Kristina Anilane – Curating the City: Observations of an Emerging Global Urban Initiative
Christine Atchison – DC Comics: Readership and Religion
Pamela Breda (KU studentship) – "How to catch a star": the role of optical data and photographic documentation in explorations of outer space
Nick Cooksey – Ghosts and Time Windows – Time, Space and Affect in the UK Heritage site
Edward Dorrian – Working out of a contested common ground: A politics of drawing as collectivity and organisation
Laura Elliott – The V&A and Transatlantic Exchanges in 'Modern' Art and Design: 1945-1955
Lucia Farinati (KU studentship) – Audio Arts Archive: its legacies and trajectories
Gareth Fletcher (AHRC) – An analysis of the semiotics of provenance information in establishing symbolic and economic value for objects within the Near Eastern antiquities market
Rebecca Fortnum – The Vision of Others: works by Rebecca Fortnum, PhD by Publication/Portfolio
Indre Jakucione – The Representation of Mother and Daughter Relationships in Contemporary Cinema
Kit Hammonds – I Am Doing Curating Now (and Then), PhD by Publication/Portfolio
Bruce Haines (AHRC) – What Might Alternative Methods of Supporting Artists in the Commercial Sector Look Like?
Ayato Hattori – Memory, Narrative, and the Gaze in Japan after 1945 and 2011
Sarah Hayward (AHRC) – John Langdon Down's Normansfield: Stories from the Archives and their Contribution to Heritage
Nina Holmes – State-issued Design in the 20th Century: Irish Government Health Campaigns (1970s- 1990s)
Marianne Keating (AHRC) – "They don't do much in the cane-hole way": Representing Caribbean Whiteness and the Irish Diaspora in Jamaica through visual and material culture
Ellen Kirkpatrick – A Curious Tale of Transformation – The promise and perils of representing Superheroes
Pirrko Koppinen – Trajectories of Museum Objects: A Study of Alexander Myyryläinen's Tannery, the Tannery's Logbook, and the Open-Air Museum of Iso-Pappila in South-Eastern Finland
Christina Lambrou – Landscapes of Peripheral Modernism: The case of Adamantios Diamantis
Amber Lamonby-Pennie – Cultural Production in the Digital Age: Art, Design and Fashion School Narratives
Seoyoung Kim (AHRC) – Reinterpretation of Kingston Museum's Muybridge Collection for contemporary public engagement
Eva Manticova – Art and the Politics of Counterculture: An Interrogation of the concept of 'influence' between the late 19th century café culture in Paris and the cabaret culture of Dada in Zurich during the Great War, 1881-1916
Katya Micallef (government scholarship) – Understanding the context of contemporary visual art in Malta from 1989 to 2015: A curator's perspective
Joana P. B. Neves (AHRC) – Following the indexical line: a dialogic study of 1960s abstract art through the scientific imagery of photographic innovator Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904)
Kaja Pawelak (KU studentship) – The City as Stage: Reading Poland's post-socialist transformation through art practices in (and on) public space in Warsaw
Anna Pfautsch (KU studentship) – The Tradition of Social Documentary Photography in the GDR and it Impact on a Contemporary Documentary Photography Practice
Matthew Richardson – I underline the things you should keep: The visual adaptation of the J.G. Ballard Archive
Alice (Guo) Rui (government scholarship) – A Comparative Study of Art and Design Education in China and UK
Karima Al Sholemy – An Intimate Object: A Practice-based Study of the Emirati Burqa (PhD, 2016)
Ben Angwin – Pre-War Episodes of Modernism in England: An Investigation into the practices of Roger Fry and Herbert Read. (MA by Research, 2013)
Maria Aroni – The Aesthetics of Curating: Exhibition-making After the Conceptual Turn (PhD, 2017)
Jim Backhouse – The ‘Collective Phantom': Convergent Networks, counterculture and the recomposition of the radical political subject (MA by Research, 2012)
Kathryn Baird (nee Main) – To What Extent is there an opportunity for contemporary art consumption among London based small to medium enterprises (SMEs)? (MA by Research, 2008)
David Cowlard – Photourbanism Documentary Photography and Urban Thinking (MA by Research, 2010)
Ruth Debney – Personality, Patronage and Publishing: The Creative Relationships of Artist, Writer and Publisher in the Formation of Artistic Publishing in Fin de siecle London (MA by Research, 2008)
Anthony Escott – Alan Cuthbert: Colour Theory and Practice and English Art School Change in the early 1960s (PhD, 2005)
Hazel Frizell – Representations of specific concerns of the women's liberation movement in British feminist art, 1970-1978 (PhD, 2009). Further details (PDF).
Mercy Kagia – Documenting Daily Life through Reportage Drawing (PhD, 2013)
John Keefe – A Spectatorial Dramaturgy: Ethical Principles of Recycling, Habitus and Estrangement (PhD by Publication, 2013)
Juliette Kristensen – Writing Acts: The Rise of Mechanised Writing and the Body of Modernity, 1711 - 1905 (PhD, 2012)
Rahat Masud – Materialising the Spiritual in Contemporary Painting in Pakistan: An Artist's Exploration of Figurative Art and Sufism (PhD, 2010). Further details (PDF).
Rosalind McKever – Futurism and the Past Temporalities, avant-gardism and tradition in Italian art and its histories 1909-1919 (PhD, 2013)
Patrick O'Neill – Investigating the 1980s Hollywood Teen Genre: Adolescence, Character, Space (PhD, 2016)
Daniel Palmer – Exhibiting Practice: Retrospective Survey Exhibitions of Conceptual Art 1989 - 2000 (PhD, 2007)
Mary Pearce – Colour and Communication in Twentieth Century Abstract Art (PhD, 2001)
Alice Planel – Artists of Algerian origin exhibiting in France in 1989–2012: An analysis of selected artists' work and its reception – the urban, the home and the Arab woman, and the ‘global' art world (PhD, 2014)
Ann Rau Dawes – Milein Cosman: A Critique of the Biography and Representation of the Jewish Émigré Artist 1939-1959 (MA by Research, 2013)
Alexandra Reynolds – Crowdsourcing, Curating and Network Power: Towards a Critical Crowdsourced Cultural Archive (PhD, 2016)
Michael Robinson – The Dealer System in Early 20th Century Britain (MA by Research, 2005)
Yoshiko Shimada – Gendaishicho-sha Bigakkō: Undercurrents in Japanese Art and Politics from 1960 to 1975 (PhD, 2015)
Lina Stergiou – The Concept of the Avant-Garde in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Architecture. History, Theory, Criticism (PhD, 2015)
Eliza Tan – Yoshiko Shimada: Art, Feminism and Memory in Japan after 1989 (PhD, 2016)
Jane Wildgoose – Collecting and Interpreting Human Skulls and Hair in Late Nineteenth Century London: Passing Fables & Comparative Readings at The Wildgoose Memorial Library. An artist's response to the DCMS Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums (2005) (PhD, 2015)
Valerie Webb – Representations of Class and Gender in Selected Paintings of London Interiors by Artists Belonging to the Camden Town Group (MPhil, 2003)
Sarah Zaidan – The Adventures of MetaMan: The Superhero as a Metaphor for Modern Western Masculinity (1940-2010) (PhD, 2011). Further details (PDF)
Aleksandra Zavjalova – Small voices, big narratives: Problems of remembering and identifying the Post-Soviet Space. The case of Stalinist architectural ensemble in Sillamae, Estonia (MA by Research, 2013)
