Professor Lynda Nead

Lynda Nead is Visiting Professor of History of Art having previously been Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on the history of British art and culture and on gender, sexuality, the city and visual representation. Lynn’s approach to visual images is interdisciplinary and intermedial; examining art in its historical and social contexts and in relation to other visual media in the period. She also has an interest in film as a research output and has collaborated with colleagues in the field on video essays arising from her recent research. Her books include: The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (reissued in 2024 as a Routledge Classic); Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (Yale UP, 2000); The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography and Film c.1900 (Yale UP, 2008); and The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Postwar Britain (Yale UP for the Paul Mellon Centre, 2018). Her latest book, British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Postwar Britain, which includes material delivered as the Paul Mellon Lectures at the Victoria & Albert Museum and Yale University in 2023-24, will be published by Yale UP for the Paul Mellon Centre in autumn 2025. She is currently working on a book on the 1947 British film It Always Rains on Sunday, for the British Film Institute Film Classics series, published by Bloomsbury Press.

Lynn is a Fellow (and Member of Council) of the British Academy (FBA), the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS) and of the Academy of Europe (MAE). In 2021, she was made a Fellow of the Association for Art History (AAH). She has had a number of governance roles in British museums and art galleries, including Trustee of the Victoria & Albert Museum and is currently a Trustee of the Holburne Museum in Bath and of Campaign for the Arts, a lobbying group that champions widening access to the arts and culture.

In 2017 Lynn was Moore Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Technology; she has also been a Visiting Professor of History of Art at Gresham College and was recently a ‘Fields of the Future’ Research Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. Lynn has been awarded a number of research grants, including an AHRC ‘Cultural Engagement’ grant, a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and a Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Senior Research Fellowship. In 2016 Lynn was guest curator for ‘The Fallen Woman’, a multimedia exhibition at the Foundling Museum, which was supported by Cockayne – Grants for the Arts, the Idlewood Trust and the Art Fund Crowdfunding site, amongst others.

Lynn has supervised doctoral students in a range of subjects within British art and culture; thesis topics have included: ‘Whiteness, Sport and Visual Culture’; ‘Women Vorticists’; ‘Women and Photographic Albums in the Nineteenth Century’; ‘Masculinity, the Body and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century America’; ‘The Image of the Cashmere Shawl in Victorian Art and Culture’; and ‘Spiritualism and the Art of James Tissot’. She teaches courses on nineteenth and twentieth-century British art and culture, along with lectures on approaches to the History of Art.

Lynn has contributed to a number of arts documentaries on the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky Arts and is a regular contributor to arts programmes on BBC radio, such as Front Row and Free Thinking.

Publications

Books

The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Postwar Britain. London and New Haven: Yale University Press / Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2017. Shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, 2018.
The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. Co-editor and contributor with Costas Douzinas. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999.
Sexual Geographies. Co-editor and contributor with Frank Mort. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999.
The Actuality of Walter Benjamin. Co-editor with Laura Marcus. London: Lawrence and Wishart; New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Between Two Cultures: The Work of Chila Kumari Burman. London: Arts Council and Kala Press, 1995.
The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Republished with a new Introduction Routledge Classics, 2024.
Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

Selected Articles

‘A Bruise, A Neck and A Little Finger: The Visual Archive of Ruth Ellis.’ Radical History Review. 14:2 (2022): 57-71.
‘Ruth Ellis’s Suit.’ British Art Studies. 21 (2021)
With John Wyver. ‘Bert Hardy: Exercises with Film and Photography.’ British Art Studies. 15 (2020)
‘”Red Taffeta Under Tweed”: The Meaning of Colour in Post-War Clothes.’ In ‘The Look of Austerity’, special issue of Fashion Theory. 21:4 (2017): 365-89.
‘Fallen Women and Foundlings: Rethinking Victorian Sexuality.’ History Workshop Journal. 81:2 (Autumn 2016): 177-88.
‘The Secret of England’s Greatness.’ Journal of Victorian Culture. 19:2 (2014): 161-82.
‘The Layering of Pleasure: Women, Fashionable Dress and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century.’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 35:3 (2013): 489-509.
‘The Cutman: Boxing, the Male Body and the Wound.’ Sports, Ethics and Philosophy. 7:4 (December 2013): 368-78.
‘Stilling the Punch: Violence and the Photographic Image.’ Journal of Visual Culture. 10:3 (December 2011): 305-23.
‘The History in Pictures.’ Cultural and Social History. 7:4 (2010): 485-92.
‘The Art of Making Faces.’ Textual Practice. 22:1 (March 2008): 133-43.
‘Strip: Moving Bodies in the 1890s.’ Early Popular Visual Culture. 3:2 (September 2005): 135-50.
‘Velocities of the Image c.1900.’ Art History. 27:5 (November 2004): 745-69.
‘Animating the Everyday: London on Canvas and Camera c.1900.’ Journal of British Studies. 43 (January 2004): 65-90
‘Visual Cultures of the Courtroom: Reflections on History, Law and the Image.’ Visual Culture in Britain. 3:2 (2002). Revised version published in Current Legal Issues (March 2005).
‘Paintings, Films and Fast Cars: A Case Study of Hubert von Herkomer.’ Art History. 25:2 (April 2002): 240-55.

Selected Contributions to Edited Collections

‘The Artist’s Studio: The Affair of Art and Film.’ In Angela dalle Vacche, ed. Museum Without Walls: Film, Art, New Media. New York and London: Palgrave, 2012, pp. 30-51.
‘”Many little harmless and interesting adventures…”: Gender and the Victorian City.’ In Martin Hewitt, ed. The Victorian World. London and New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 291-307.
‘Freedom from Publicity or Right to Information?: Visual Cultures of the Courtroom.’ In Kjell A. Modeer and Martin Sunnquist, eds. Legal Stagings. Copenhagen: Museum of Tusculanum Press, 2012, pp. 59-87.
‘The Age of the “Hurrygraph”: Motion, Space and the Visual Image c.1900.’ In Morna O’Neill and Michael Hatt, eds. The Edwardian Sense: Art, Design, and Performance in Britain, 1901-10. New Haven and London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 99-113.
‘Ringcraft: Under the Spell of Boxing.’ In Michael Berkowitz and Ruti Ungar, eds. Fighting Back? Jewish and Black Boxers in Britain. London: University College London Press, 2007), pp. 83-94.

Selected Essays in Exhibition Catalogues

‘The Grain of History: Photojournalism in Post-War Britain.’ In Henry Moore / Bill Brandt. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2020, pp. 92-6.
‘Marc Quinn: The Matter of Art.’ In Marc Quinn Retrospective. Exhibition catalogue. Montreal: Montreal Museum of Modern Art, 2007, pp. 40-7.
‘Material Serendipity: Chila Kumari Burman.’ In Chila Kumari Burman. Exhibition catalogue. Plymouth: Plymouth Arts Centre and Cecil Higgins Museum, Bedford, 2004, n.p.
‘Diego Velazquez: The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’).’ In Saved! 100 Years of the National Art Collections Fund. Exhibition catalogue. London: NACF and the Hayward Gallery, London, 2003, pp. 73-9.

Research Leadership, Public Service, Honours and Awards

April 2024 – Visiting Lecturer, Center for British Art Studies / Yale University, New Haven.
2024 – Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).
2024 – Elected Member of Council and Trustee of the British Academy.
Oct – Nov 2023 – Paul Mellon Lecturer, ‘British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Postwar Britain.’ Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
2023 – Appointed Trustee of Campaign for the Arts.
2023 – Appointed Trustee of the Holburne Museum, Bath. Chair of Learning and Engagement Committee.
2021, 2023 – Assessor for Philip Leverhulme Prize.
2021 – Appointed Fellow of the Association for Art History.
2020-21 – Appointed Assessor for UoA 32 Art and Design, Research Excellence Framework 2021.
2019-current – Member of the Modern & Contemporary Advisory Panel, The National Gallery, London.
2018 – Elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).
2017-22 – Member of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Advisory Council.
2017 – Elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).
2017-current – Member of the Museum of London Academic Advisory Panel.
2016-22 – Appointed Trustee of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Chair of the Trustees’ Research Committee; Member of the Trustees’ Collections Committee.
2016-20 – Member of English Heritage Blue Plaques Panel.
2015 – Elected Member of Academia Europaea (MAE)
2013 – Elected Member of Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art.
2012-17 – Member of the Research Advisory Panel, National Portrait Gallery, London.
2011-22 – Member of the Exhibitions Group, Foundling Museum, London.
2005-12 – Member of the Leverhulme Trust Research Awards Advisory Council.
2003-7 – Member of the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art Studies Advisory Council.
1999-2006 – Member of the Council of Tate Britain.