This cluster brings together faculty expertise in art and material culture that engages with ecology, environment, systems, and habitat, to develop new ways of thinking about art history through ecological and infrastructural approaches. It takes a broad social and intersectional perspective on ecological art histories, while foregrounding infrastructure as a method for interrogating the material, political, and symbolic intersections of human-built systems and natural environments. This approach attends to the ways in which infrastructure shapes relations—between bodies, technologies, environments, and institutions—and offers a lens through which to examine ecological entanglements, extractive histories, and power dynamics.
The Art, Ecologies, Infrastructures research cluster proposes a set of questions that are both historical and methodological and that engage art and material culture across different chronologies and geographies:
What does it mean to undertake an infrastructural approach to art history and what potential does it have to challenge existing art historical, institutional, conservation, or curatorial paradigms? How does an infrastructural approach intersect with other ecological and decolonial imperatives in art history?
How have artists engaged critically with infrastructures and the relationalities that they engender? How have these practices informed research, writing and curating?
What insight can art history bring to infrastructures of resistance—whether by supporting alternative systems, subverting dominant ones, or prefiguring new social imaginaries and collaborative systems?

Hundreds of Birds Killed
2019.
Brass sculptural works and sound
Installation view, 58th Venice Biennale, Pavilion of Pakistan
Curated by Zahra Khan and commissioned by the Pakistan National Council of the Arts.
Photo credit:Riccardo Tosetto
Copyright @Naiza Khan Studio
www.naizahkhan.com
Cluster leads
Cluster members
Dr Jessica Barker
Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art History

Professor Alixe Bovey, FSA FRHistS
Professor of Medieval Art History

Dr Esther Chadwick
Lecturer in Art History

Dr Indie A. Choudhury
Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art

Dr Elena Crippa
Curator of Contemporary Art: Exhibitions and Projects

Professor Steve Edwards
Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art

Professor Dorothy Price FBA
Executive Dean and Deputy Director, and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History

Dr Johanna Gosse
Lecturer in Lens and Time-Based Art Histories

Dr Pia Gottschaller
Reader in Technical Art History

Dr. Sarah Grandin
Lecturer in the Arts of Early Modern France

Dr Catherine Grant
Reader and Vice-Dean for Education

Dr Tom Nickson
Reader in Medieval Art & Architecture

Millie Riddell
PhD Student

Professor Robin Schuldenfrei
Tangen Professor in 20th Century Modernism

Dr Rachel Sloan
Associate Curator for Works on Paper

Dr Meredyth Winter
Lecturer in Early Islamic Arts

Dr Tom Young
Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Art Histories
