Artistic, Visual and Material Cultures of Gender and Sexuality
Building on feminist and queer interventions in the history of art, this research stream explores the visual as a space of both absence and agency with respect to changing understandings of gender and sexuality across time.
Working from the medieval period to the contemporary moment and encompassing material from Britain, Europe, and the Global South, our research analyses fine art, photography, books, and mass media to produce new histories of gender and sexuality. Our work is interdisciplinary. We consider how study of artistic, visual and material cultures leads us to question, for example, the political history of women’s relationship to book ownership, men’s and women’s relationships to domesticity, and the formation of LGBTQ identities in relation to authoritarianism and empire.
This research forms the basis for groundbreaking and blockbuster exhibitions at major museums and galleries in the UK and internationally. Through these collaborations we reach much wider and diverse audiences while artistic, visual and material cultures shaping and shaped by gender and sexuality remain central to our research-led teaching in the department. This includes undergraduate and postgraduate modules such as ‘Modern Erotica: Sex, Censorship and Art’, ‘Inside Out: Interior and Interiority in French Art, Design and Culture’, ‘Contemporary Art and Masculinity’ and ‘Women and Artistic Culture in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period’.