I was recently awarded my doctorate for a thesis titled Being Together With Others: Queer American Art and the Family 1990-2020, supervised by Professor Jo Applin and funded by AHRC / CHASE. My project examined the work of American artists Catherine Opie, A.K. Summers and Harry Dodge, exploring the ways in which the queer family — specifically lesbian and transgender experiences — provides a framework through which to think about each of their art. Over three chapters I traced the diverse range of representational tactics each artist uses to make visible and viable queer formulations of being together with others, framed via the themes of community, pregnancy, and family.
I currently deliver outreach workshops to schools, colleges and adults across the UK in my role as an Educator in the Courtauld’s Public Programmes team. Combining academic and practical art-based approaches, these workshops provide cross-curricular online, in-gallery, and outreach programmes which aim to widen access to art history and transform our relationship to art. I also write and deliver workshops on Feminism and Queer Theory.
Education
- PhD The Courtauld Institute of Art, (2017 – Dec 2021)
AHRC/CHASE funded. - MA History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art, Distinction. (2015 – 2016)
– Special Option: ‘Sex and Violence in American Art, 1960-Now’ with Professor Mignon Nixon.
– Thesis Title: Bisexuality & Louise Bourgeois: precarious objects and the unmanageable subject. An anxious encounter with Avenza and Avenza Revisited (1968-69). - BA Art History, University College London, First Class Honours. (2012 – 2015)
Teaching
- Wrote and delivered ‘Art & Identity: Race, Gender and Power’ for a Teachers’ CPD Event (April 2022).
- A series of six workshops with Hospital Rooms, an arts and mental health charity (January 2022).
- Wrote and delivered ‘Art and Queer Theory’ and ‘Art and Feminism’ for the Insights into Art History workshops (October 2021, December 2020).
- Art History Summer University, introduction to Art History for Year 12 students (Summer 2020).
- BA and Graduate Diploma Foundations Course, ‘Modern and Contemporary Art’ teaching assistant, The Courtauld Institute of Art. (Summer 2019).
- Guest lecturer, ‘Queer Subjects’ for 1st year BA and Graduate Diploma students (Summer 2019).
- MA Core Methodology Course, The Courtauld Institute of Art (Autumn 2018).
- Teaching Assistant for Art History Link Up, fast track AS course.
Research Interests
- Feminism
- Queer Theory
- Critical Race Theory
- Bisexuality
- Gender and Subjectivity
- Materiality
- Modern and Contemporary art
Awards
- The Dean’s List, 2015.
- Frances Stracey Sessional Prize, 2014.
Conference Papers
- ‘Everyone and everything in relation: Harry Dodge’s sculptural and textual practice’, Third Year PhD Symposium, The Courtauld Institute of Art, June 2021.
- ‘Queering the experience of pregnancy and parenthood: A. K. Summers’ Pregnant Butch’, Second Year PhD Symposium, Third Year PhD Symposium, The Courtauld Institute of Art, June 2019.
- Being and Having, Looking and Living: Catherine Opie’s Being and Having series and the Queer Communal Experience, paper given at ‘Experience and American Art’ Conference, organised by Professor David Peters Corbett (Courtauld) and Professor Alexander Nemerov (Stanford University), March 2018.
Other Academic Activity
- Co-organiser of Queer Conversations: Looking to Art History and Visual Culture, Modern and Contemporary Postgraduate Colloquium with Andrew Cummings.
- Editorial Board, immediations, the peer-reviewed postgraduate journal of the Courtauld Institute of Art
- Gender, Sexuality & Violence Research Network