Steve Edwards joined the Courtauld in April 2025 as Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the newly established Manton Centre for British Art, which hosts conferences, workshops and research lectures. He began teaching at the University of Derby and subsequently held professorships at the Open University, where he was also head of the art history department, and Birkbeck, University of London.
Steve attended state school and began working life as an apprentice in heavy industry, before changing direction and taking an art school degree in Fine Art. Having been attracted to art history by his undergraduate teacher Martin I Gaughan, he switched subject and undertook the MA in the Social History of Art at the University of Leeds with John Tagg and Griselda Pollock, and his PhD on nineteenth-century British photography at Portsmouth and Leeds with Adrian Rifkin and, for a period, the historian R.Q. Gray.
He researches history of photography, art and industrial culture, and critical art and theory since the 1970s. His books include: The Making of English Photography, Allegories (2006); Photography: A Very Short Introduction (2006); Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (2012); and, with Professor Gail Day, Amphibious Realities: Allan Sekula’s Documentary Poetics (2025). He has also edited seven volumes of art history and social theory; he also regularly writes for international exhibition catalogues. Steve is currently completing a study of daguerreotype portraiture and the English middle class in the 1840s and 1850s. His research has been translated into twelve languages.
Steve has held visiting professorships at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the University of Bourdeaux-Montaigne and has been allocated several grants and fellowships, including a research partnership with the University of São Paulo and the Senior Fellowship awarded by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art Studies. He is currently the chair of the editorial group for the Oxford Art Journal and a member of the editorial collective for the Historical Materialism book series (Brill/Haymarket).
Teaching
- MA: Victorian Afterlives (with Professor Lynda Nead).
Publications
Monographs
The Making of English Photography: Allegories, 2006.
Photography: A Very Short Introduction, 2006.
Martha Rosler. The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 2012.
Edited volumes
Communards and Other Cultural Histories Essays by Adrian Rifkin, edited by Steve Edwards, 2016.
The Conspiracy of Modern Art by Luiz Renato Martins, edited by Steve Edwards, 2017.
Amphibious Realities: Allan Sekula’s Documentary Poetics, Edited by Steve Edwards, Gail Day, 2025.
