Will Atkin

Associate Lecturer

Teaching

I teach a range of topics spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Key subjects and themes of my teaching have included: Romantic art and literature, early photography, artistic and literary figurations of science and industry in the nineteenth century, Symbolist art and poetry, twentieth-century avant-gardism, and the history of the Surrealist Movement, which is the principal focus of my research.

Research

Books:

Surrealist Sorcery: Objects, Theories, and Practices of Magic in the Surrealist Movement (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Historical Dictionary of Surrealism (Rowman & Littlefield / Bloomsbury, 2021).

Book/catalogue chapters:

> ‘Endless Metamorphosis: Surrealism and Alchemy’, Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity (Prestel, 2022), for the exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and Museum Barberini, Potsdam. 

> Forthcoming contribution to the companion volume to André Breton’s Magic Art (Fulgur, 2024).

> Forthcoming chapter in Surrealism and the Tarot: a Love Story (Fulgur, 2025).

> Forthcoming chapters in the catalogue for the exhibition Rendezvous of Dreams: Surrealism and German Romanticism (Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2025).

Articles:

> ‘Demonic Surrealism in Bucharest: Black Magic, Gothicism and Nihilism in Gherasim Luca’s The Passive Vampire (1941-1945), Dada/Surrealism vol. 24 (April 2023).

> ‘Oceanic Metamorphoses: Easter Island, Paul Gauguin and “Magic Art” through the Eyes of the Surrealists’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing vol.54 no.5 (February 2019).

> ‘Supernatural Beings, Shamans and Dream-places: Jules Monnerot and the Native American Touchstones of Surrealism’s Mythological Realignment, 1939-1945’, The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-45 vol.14 (December 2018).

> ‘Crystalline Thought: Alchemy and “Visionary Mineralogy” in the Writings of André Breton’, immediations: The Courtauld Institute of Art Journal of Postgraduate Research vol.4 no.1 (December 2016).

Education

BA – Courtauld Institute of Art (2012)

MA – Courtauld Institute of Art (2013)

PhD – Courtauld Institute of Art (2017)

Postdoctoral

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2020-2023)

Professional qualifications

Accredited FHEA

Citations