Lisa Tickner studied fine art before switching to art history and completing a PhD on the arts and crafts movement in 1970. She is Emeritus Professor of Art History at Middlesex University and joined The Courtauld as Visiting Professor in 2007. Her first book, The Spectacle of Women: imagery of the suffrage campaign 1907-1914 (1988) has become a classic. Her second, Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British art in the early 20th century (2000), was short-listed for the first British Academy Book Prize. In addition to numerous articles in the academic press she is the author of two further books (on Rossetti, and on art education), and co-editor of four collections of essays on visual culture published 1993-6. Her new book, London’s New Scene: art and culture in the 1960s, will be published by Yale University Press in 2020.
In 1996-7 she gave the Paul Mellon Lectures in British Art at the National Gallery, London, and at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. She has lectured widely in Europe, Australia and the USA and held visiting fellowships at Northwestern University, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute in Massachusetts. She has served on the Humanities Research Board (now the Arts and Humanities Research Council), the British National Committee of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, the Advisory Council and Publications Committee of the Paul Mellon Centre, and the Blue Plaques Panel of English Heritage. Lisa Tickner was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2008, and has been a Trustee of the Art Fund since 2010.