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.
Amphibious Realities: Allan Sekula’s Documentary Poetics, by Steve Edwards, Gail Day, 2025.
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.
Recent journal essays
‘Institution of Autonomy: The Worker Photography Movement’, Notes from Below, October 2024:
‘White Collar Blues: Allan Sekula Casts an Eye Over the Professional-Managerial Class’, Nonsite, 8th December 2021
‘Why Pictures? From Art History to Business History and Back Again’, History of Photography, 2020, Vol.44, No.1, pp.3-15.
‘Making a Case: Daguerreotypes’, British Art Studies, No.18, November 2020: With three embedded short films.
‘“Beard Patentee”: Daguerreotype Property and Authorship’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2013,pp.369-394. Republished as ‘The Daguerreotype Patent: Richard Beard and the Emergence of Photography in Britain’, Acervo: Revista Do Arquivo Nacional, Vol.32, No.2, 2019, pp.38-67.
Recent book chapters
‘“Times Carcass”: Art History, Temporality. and Capitalism’, Tijan Tunali & Brian Winkenweder eds, The Routledge Companion to Marxist art Histories, Routtledge, 2025, pp.146-61
(with Gail Day & Marina Vishmidt) ‘Art’, Beverley Skeggs, Sara F. Farris, Alberto Toscano & Svenja Bromberg eds, The Sage Handbook of Marxism, Vol.3, Sage, 2021, pp.747-765.
(with Gail Day) ‘Differential time and aesthetic form: uneven and combined capitalism in the work of Allan Sekula’, James Christie & Degirmencioglu eds, Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development, 2019, Brill, Leiden, pp.253-88.
Slightly different version published as “‘Recoding the Sea”: Uneven and Combined Capitalism in the work of Allan Sekula (Telegraph Version)’ in Anne Chapman and Natalie Hume eds, Scrambled Images: Coding and Representation from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, Routledge, 2021, pp.161-88.
‘“Dirty Realism”: Documentary Photography in 1970s Britain – a Maquette’, Malcolm Baker & Andrew Hemingway eds, Art as World Making: Critical Essays on Realism & Naturalism, Manchester University Press, 2018, pp.248-67.
‘Allan Sekula: Fish Story’, Kunst und Politik Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft, Icons of 20th-Century Political Art/Politische Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, Andrew Hemingway & Norbert Schneider eds.
Allan Sekula’s Chronotopes: Uneven and Combined Capitalism’, in H. Van Gelde ed., Ship of Fools/The Dockers Museum, Leuven University Press, 2015, pp.31-43 in French: ‘Les chronotopes d’Allan Sekula: le capitalisme Inégal et combiné’; Edition établie par Hilde Van Gelde, Ship of Fools/The Dockers Museum, La Criée centre d’art contemporain, Frac Bretagne, 2015, pp.31-44; Republished on-line in Revue Pèriod, in Portuguese: ‘Os Chronótops de Allan Sekula: capitalism desigual e combinado’, Organizado por Hilde
Van Gelde, Ship of Fools/TheDockers Museum, Lumiar Cité/Maumaus, 2015, pp.31-55;in Italian: ‘I cronotopi di Allan Sekula: il capitalismo ineguale e combinato’, Traduzioni Marxiste, September, 2016.
Exhibition Catalogues
‘The Street & the Barricades: Demos and Document in Nineteenth-Century Photography’, Jorge Ribalta ed. Before Documentary, 1848-1917, Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2022 (Proof stage) In English and Spanish. To accompany the exhibition Before Documentary, 1848-1917, Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid, November 2022.
‘Photography, Industry, Work’, Paul Mellenthin and Olga Osadtschy eds, Exposure Time: Photographs from the Collection Ruth and Peter Herzog, Kunstmuseum Basel/Christoph Marian Verlag, 2020, pp.268-81.
German: ‘Fotografie, Industrie, Arbeit’, Herausgegeben von Paul Mellenthin und Olga Osadtschy, Belichtungszeit: Fotografien aus der Sammlung Ruth und Peter Herzog, Kunstmuseum Basel/Christoph Marian Verlag, 2020, pp.268-81.
Blog series
‘The Fire Last Time: Documentary and Politics in 1970s Britain’, 5 Blogposts for Fotomuseum Wintherthur, 7th September-5th November 2017.
Women and work republished in Monthly Review on-line.
