Decentring British Art - University of Birmingham

Our research produces new histories of art in and from Britain, scrutinising its cultural position in regional, national and international contexts and grappling with the global forces that have shaped it.

We make new paradigms for interrogating and reassessing canonical figures in British art histories such as the Pre-Raphaelites in the nineteenth century and Francis Bacon and David Hockney in the twentieth century. We also spotlight the centrality to these histories of fields that have been overlooked, including folk art, religion, public sculpture, the decorative, and the formation of regional art collections. We work to uncover how art in and from Britain engages with key questions at the heart of British life – about community and class; about national identity and Britain’s relationship to the world – and we rethink what it means to study British art through the lens of empire, migration, and globalisation.

The West Midlands is an internationally significant region for histories of British art. It is the location, at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, of world-leading collections of art by the Pre-Raphaelites, the British Surrealists, and the 1980s BLK Art Group, plus significant collections of British art at the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, and the New Art Gallery, Walsall. We engage with these histories and institutions on our MA History of Art pathway in British Art and across our undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, including on our modules ‘The Pre-Raphaelites’, ‘Sculptural Experiments in Britain, 1837-1901' and ‘Queer Art from Britain since 1957’.

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