This event marks the publication of Lynda Nead’s latest book, British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain (Paul Mellon Centre / Yale University Press, 2025). This project was initially presented as the Paul Mellon Lecture series, given at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2023. As part of that series the PMC commissioned four new short video essays from filmmakers Catherine Grant and John Wyver that responded to the arguments and materials in the lecture series. Exploring the medium of the essay film, they work with still and moving images to develop ideas concerning women and desire and the visual imagery of Diana Dors, Barbara Windsor, Ruth Ellis and Pauline Boty. This launch event will be only the second UK screening of these films, which will be followed by a panel discussion with Lynda Nead, the filmmakers, and Dr Johanna Gosse, chaired by Professor Steve Edwards, Manton Professor of British Art.
Organised by Lynda Nead, Visiting Professor of History of Art, The Courtauld.
With contributions from:
Catherine Grant is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Reading and Honorary Professor at Aarhus Universitet. She carries out her film studies research mostly in the form of remix-based video essays. For more than a decade she was founding co-editor of the award-winning publication [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies. In 2020, Grant was elected a member of the Film, Media and Visual Studies section of Academia Europaea in recognition of her research contribution to the field.
John Wyver is a writer, producer and director with Illuminations, and Professor of the Arts on Screen, University of Westminster. His work as a producer has been honoured with a BAFTA, an International Emmy and a Peabody. He collaborated with Lynda Nead on the multimedia article ‘Bert Hardy: Exercises with Photography and Film’, British Art Studies Issue 15. Other publications include The Royal Shakespeare Company on Screen: A Critical History (2019) and Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain (forthcoming, 2026).
Johanna Gosse is an art historian, curator, and Lecturer in Lens and Time-Based Art Histories at the Courtauld. Johanna’s research focuses on postwar American art history, and in 2023-24, she was the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at Oxford University. In 2022, she co-edited with Timothy Stott, Nervous Systems: Art, Systems, and Politics since the 1960s, published by Duke University Press. She is currently organising a major exhibition on the work of American artist and film-maker Marie Menken for the National Museum of Lithuania.