Professor Stephen Barber
- Kingston School of Art
- Department of Critical and Historical Studies
- School of Creative and Cultural Industries
Research Professor in Art History
About
Since 2012, I have been a research professor in Art History in the School of Art faculty at Kingston University and co-director of the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre. I previously held research positions at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, the University of Tokyo and Tokyo Keio University, the IMEC Research Institute in Paris, the Berlin Free University, and the Berlin University of the Arts.
My research has been funded by a wide range of research councils and foundations, including the AHRC, the German Ministry for Research and Education, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. My research is focused on urban cultures and their relationship to art and moving-image forms.
I have published many books in my areas of research, most recently Berlin Bodies: Anatomising the Streets of the City (2017), Film's Ghosts: Tatsumi Hijikata and the Transmutation of 1960s Japan (2019), and The Projectionists: Eadweard Muybridge, and the Future Projections of the Moving Image (2020). In 2022, a book of my translations of Antonin Artaud's final writings, 'A Sinister Assassin', will be published. I am now developing a new research project, 'Into the Wastelands', spanning art, film and urban topographies, on the subject of the future of urban wastelands.
I have presented my research at such venues as the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Royal Academy, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Japan Society in New York, the Mori Museum in Tokyo, and the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio.
In June 2020, David Peace wrote about my books in the Times Literary Supplement: ‘Beginning in 1993 with Artaud: Blows and Bombs, Stephen Barber has quietly, independently forged one of the most singular and enriching bodies of work in contemporary writing.'
Qualifications
- BA (Hons)
- PhD