My research to date has focused on themes of masculinity and home in post-war British art. My book - Art And Masculinity in Post-War Britain: Reconstructing Home - is published by Bloomsbury in November 2019. It traces how artists represented home and masculinities in the period of social and personal reconstruction after the Second World War in Britain. It considers home as an unstable entity at this historical moment, imbued with the optimism and hopes of post-war recovery while continuing to resonate with the memories and traumas of wartime. Artists examined in the book include John Bratby, Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan, Francis Newton Souza, Victor Pasmore, and Gilbert & George. Case studies featured range from the nuclear family and the body, to the nation. Combined, they present an argument that art enables an understanding of post-war reconstruction as a temporally unstable, long-term phenomenon which placed conceptions of home and masculinity at the heart of its aims.
My next research project examines queer British art since 1945 in a global context. Scholarship, exhibitions, and popular publications on queer British art history and queer British history have, to date, largely had a national-focus, examining changes in legislation, activism, home, and urban experience. But what would a queer British history look like if we explored the histories of colonialism, decolonisation, and global migration that have shaped queer subjectivity in Britain since the Second World War? This project explores travels, ideas, experiences, encounters, and migrations into and outside of Britain are fundamental to our understanding of queer British art history and queer British history. I argue that artworks can function as forms of archival work in this context, making visible these elements of queer British history that otherwise elude traditional archives. Artists include: Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Sunil Gupta, and Isaac Julien.