Dr Sean Ketteringham

• DPhil University of Oxford
• MA Courtauld Institute of Art
• BA University of Liverpool

I joined Birmingham in 2026 having been Assistant Curator at the Henry Moore Institute where I curated two exhibitions: Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age (15 May - 30 August 2026) and Passing Strange: British Land Art Through Time (18 July - 2 November 2025). Prior to that, I held postdoctoral positions at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the University of Oxford, and the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. In a curatorial capacity I have worked across museum and heritage settings on John Latham's home at Flat Time House, modern art in the National Trust's collections, and the Courtauld Collection of Works of Paper.

I grew up in North Yorkshire and initially studied English Literature at the University of Liverpool, graduating in 2016. I went on to study History of Art at the Courtauld for my MA, specialising twentieth-century art in Britain, before completing my DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2022. My first book, Architectures of Identity: Imperial Decline and the Homes of English Modernism, which is based on my doctoral thesis, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

My current research sets out to build a new account of postwar British cultural history through the first examination of late modernism’s interaction with folk art and anthropological thought after 1945. Entitled 'Postwar Folk: Modernism Anthropological Imagination and the Idea of England', it examines how folk art and anthropology were deployed to critique and reform English national identities during decolonisation. I turn to Peggy Angus's journeys in Indonesia, Aubrey Williams's and Eduardo Paolozzi's work in the Independent Group, Doris Lessing’s documentary fiction, Idries Shah's spiritualism, and Robert Graves's poetry, to understand how an anthropological imagination provided the basis for forms of decolonisation, sexual liberation, and political organisation which flourished in the 1960s.

My wider research interests span architectural history and literary studies, and thinkers such as Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy, David Graeber, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, and Raymond Williams. My recent and forthcoming publication projects include the anarchist anti-imperialism of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the coloniality of architectural preservation in the Atlantic world, and T.S. Eliot’s imperialist visions of the English countryside.