Hattie Spires

PhD Student; Associate Lecturer

Thesis title: Harlem through Britain: the transnational impacts of the Harlem Renaissance through imperial networks, ca 1919-1969

Supervisors: Professor Dorothy Price and Dr Hilary Floe (Tate)

Funded by: AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership

My research takes the Harlem Renaissance as a visible point of change in the visual arts during the 1920s and 1930s in the United States and explores whether the ideas behind the art, artists and writers associated with the movement may be traced through Pan-African independence movements and solidarity networks to the practice of artists in Britain and former ‘Commonwealth’ countries in West Africa and the Caribbean.
Harlem Renaissance scholarship has traditionally considered the movement to be a national school – in fact, defined more narrowly to upper Manhattan – yet a significant number of its key contributors travelled extensively and were based mainly outside of New York City. My research resists the orthodox scholarship that explores the Harlem – Paris axis, instead tracing the networks of cross-cultural exchange via the threads of the end of the British Empire in a move to disrupt canonical histories of Western modernism.
Using Tate collection works as a starting point and drawing on material in key archives across the Black Atlantic, the project traces the conversations, travels and connections between the figures from this time to re-examine the work through a new lens and consider a more globalised art history.
Hattie Spires
Email

Education

Ph.D. student, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2021 – present

M.A. Twentieth Century Art History, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Postgraduate Diploma, Arts Management, Birkbeck College, University of London

B.A. (joint Hons), History & Theory of Art and English Language, University of Kent

Writing

‘Crafting Resistance: Karen McLean’s Stitching Souls,’ Visual Culture in Britain, 28 May 2025

Zero is Nothing… and Everything: Zarah Hussain, Art UK, 2024

Editorial, Immediations, issue 20, 2023

Summer, Tate Publishing, 2020

‘A Phantom of the Road’ in Jacobi, C. (ed.) Van Gogh and Britain. London: Tate Publishing, 2019
Catalogue essay tracing the reception and interpretation of Van Gogh on Britain and British artists between 1937 – 1957.

Tate Introductions: Van Gogh. London: Tate Publishing, 2019

‘Contemporary Sensibilities’ in Crippa, E. ‘All Too Human’. London: Tate Publishing, 2018

Catalogue entries in Elliott, D. Art From Elsewhere: International Contemporary Art From UK Galleries. London: Hayward Publishing, 2014

‘Conception, Reception’, March 2005
AAH Conference 2005, University of Bristol.
‘Site and Translation in the Age of Squanto.’ Paper interrogating the increasing mobility of site-specific works.

Related work history

  • Associate Lecturer, ‘Topics: Contemporary Art in London Collections’, The Courtauld, 2024-25
  • Guest Lecturer, MA Black Futures, The Courtauld, 2025
  • Teaching Assistant, ‘Foundations’, The Courtauld, 2023-24
  • Guest Lecturer, ‘Global African Arts’, CIEE, 2023-24
  • Editor-in-Chief, Immediations Issue 20, 2023
  • Curator, Festival UK 2022, with Tate National Partnerships the European Space Agency and Holition, 2020-21
  • Curator (mat cover), Tate Britain, 2019-20
  • Guest Lecturer, University of Virginia Summer School, 2018-19
  • Assistant Curator, Tate Britain, 2017-19
  • Assistant Curator, Hayward Touring, 2010-16
  • Curatorial intern, Prints & Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002

Grants and Awards

Centre for the Art of the Americas, Research Travel Grant (2024)

Association for Art History, Grants for Art History (2024)

Research Support Grant, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (2023)

Centre for American Art, Research Travel Grant to the United States (2023)

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Studentship (2021-2025)

 

Citations