Art History
Professor Barbara Borg
Professor Barbara Borg is Head of Classics and Ancient History. She researches and teaches in the field of Classical Archaeology—the study of 'art' and archaeology of the Greeks and Romans. She contributes to the understanding of the so-called Classical civilisations and their spheres of influence by focusing on visual and material culture as a source of information, thus supplementing the predominantly text-based disciplines of Ancient History and Classics.
Professor Tim Gorringe
Professor Tim Gorringe is St Luke’s Professor of Theological Studies. His academic interests focus on the interrelation between theology, social science, art and politics. He is at present working on a two year AHRC funded research project on the values which underpin constructive social change, focussing on the Transition Town Movement.
Professor Nick Kaye
Professor Nick Kaye is Dean of the College of Humanities and Professor of Performance Studies. His research focuses on the history of post-war experimental performance, with emphasis on the relationship between performance and the development of ideas and practices through distinct but related disciplines, including sculpture, architectural theory, conceptual and performance art, aspects of experimental music, installation, video art and video installation.
Dr Melissa Percival
Dr Melissa Percival is a Senior Lecturer and an expert in eighteenth-century French studies with research interests in Eighteenth-century art, literature and history of ideas. She has published widely on theories of physiognomy and facial expression, and her recent book, Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure: Painting the Imagination, is a fresh interpretation of the group of Fragonard’s paintings known as the ‘figures de fantaisie’.
Professor Sam Smiles
Professor Sam Smiles is the Programme Director for Art History and Visual Culture, and his principal research interest is British art of the last 250 years, especially but certainly not exclusively the period from the founding of the Royal Academy (1768) to the death of JMW Turner (1851). He has a particular research focus on Turner’s career, critical reception and legacy. His other major research interest is concerned with the ways in which knowledge can be transmitted visually.
Dr Aron Vinegar
Dr Aron Vinegar is Senior Lecturer in the Programme for Art History and Visual Culture. His research and teaching is located at the intersections of art history, visual culture, architecture, theory, and aesthetics from the 19th century to the present. Dr Vinegar's current research and publication interests include: the theory and historiography of art history and visual culture; rethinking the possibility of monuments in the modern and contemporary era; techniques of suspended judgment in postwar art, architecture, design, and urbanism; issues of bodily habit in relationship to architecture, design, and the built environment; and the political ontology of modern and contemporary photographic practices.
Dr Corinna Wagner
Dr Corinna Wagner is a Lecturer in English. Her research interests focus on Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British political culture, Gothic literature, art and architecture, Romantic and Victorian Medievalism, Medicine, the Body and the Arts, and Foucault and Panopticism (architectural and medical). Dr Wagner’s current collaborative AHRC project with Dr Joanne Parker entitled Identity, Community and Victorian Medievalism investigates how Victorian artists, architects and writers borrowed from the literary artefacts and visual imagery of their region's medieval past in order to forge an aesthetic that they thought capable of inspiring 'sensus communis'—that is, a shared sensibility about what it means for a community to flourish. Dr Wagner also researches how gothic artists address issues surrounding the body and its treatment, and has published articles on neo-gothic architecture and in particular, how designers have responded to the rise of utilitarianism and panoptic design.
Visual Culture Research Group
Dr Pascale Aebischer
Dr Pascale Aebischer is a Senior Lecturer in English and researches in the field of early modern performance studies. The field and her research are multidisciplinary. She has worked across languages, tracing the evolution of a specific motif from 16th century French theatre and visual culture through to 17th century English representations in drama and visual arts.
Dr Cariad Astles
Dr Cariad Astles is an Associate Teaching Fellow in Drama. She has worked in the UK and Spain as a professional puppeteer and has taught at a range of other Higher Education and training institutions. Her teaching and research explore aspects of collective identity within popular and contemporary puppetry and festival performance; the training of the puppeteer, particularly in relationship to the approach to animation; Catalan visual theatre and Latin American popular performance.
Dr Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles
Dr Nuria Capdevila-Arguelles is a Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies. Her main fields of research within Hispanic feminism are representations of generic and sexual ambiguity in literature and art and the relationship between woman and nation. Her interest in avant-garde literature and art focuses on the work of avant-garde female authors and artists in Spain.
Dr Emma Cayley
Dr Emma Cayley is a Senior Lecturer in French and Head of Modern languages. Dr Cayley looks at text-image relationships in late medieval and early modern France, specifically manuscript illumination and paratext (marginalia, scribal interventions, materiality). Other interests include medievalism in art and culture, the Middle Ages on film, gender studies, literary and poetic community, and the history of the book.
Professor Sally Faulkner
Professor Sally Faulkner is a Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies. She has published widely in the fields of Spanish film, literature and cultural studies. Her research relates to the intertwining of film, literature, politics, society and, more recently, cultural taste, and draws on the theories of adaptation studies, intertextuality and intermediality.
Professor Gabriella Giannachi
Director of the Centre for Intermedia, Professor Gabriella Giannachi specialises in art and technology, including presence research, mixed and virtual reality, and collaborates with artists, galleries and museums towards research that informs the exhibition, documentation, archiving and replay of mixed media works. Current projects include Horizon, which aims at the development of new ways to use the electronic ‘footprints’ we leave behind whenever we use mobile, internet and other digital technologies.
Professor Marion Gibson
Professor Marion Gibson is Associate Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the Cornwall Campus. Her research focuses on the British and American literature of the supernatural from prehistory to the present, looking at witchcraft, demonology and magical religiosity. At present, she is working on the re-imagining in modern British and American culture of magical beliefs from prehistoric and ‘Dark Age’ cultures such as the ‘Celts’ and ‘Anglo-Saxons’ – work that includes literature, film and historical writing.
Dr Fiona Handyside
Dr Fiona Handyside is a Lecturer in French. Her research interests focus upon Trans-cultural approaches to female stardom in European and Hollywood cinema, cinematic spaces and the spaces of cinema. She is particularly interested in the approach taken by the French film-maker Eric Rohmer to issues of spatial representation and how his films and television programmes reflect his ethnographic sensibility and concerns with the way in which the built environment fashions everyday life.
Dr Helen Hanson
Dr Helen Hanson is a Senior Lecturer in Film. Her research interests include Hollywood cinema in the studio era, feminism and film, gender and genre, film aesthetics, particularly film sound, and literary adaptations on film. Her wider interest in female figures and their filmic representation has explored the presence of the fatal woman in literature, film and visual culture. She is interested in the material history of cinema, and uses Exeter's Bill Douglas Centre Collection widely in her research, postgraduate and undergraduate teaching.
Matthew Hayler
Mr Matthew Hayler is a Lecturer in the English department. His research and teaching focuses upon critical theory and digital humanities; his research interests include cognitive and neuropsychology, phenomenology, object-oriented ontology.
Dr Kate Hext
Dr Kate Hext is a Lecturer in English. Her research is located in the period 1860-1960, with particular emphases on the late nineteenth century. This research is motivated by questions regarding post-Darwinian reconceptions of individualism, the evolution of 'art for art's sake' in Britain, modernist conceptions of distinctly felt, sensual moments in time, and the dynamic relationship between 'philosophy' and 'literature' at the turn of the twentieth century.
Dr William Higbee
Dr William Higbee is a Senior Lecturer in French and Director of Programmes, Film. His research interests focus upon film studies and French studies, especially: contemporary French cinema, post-colonial cultures in France, diasporic cinemas and digital media, questions of national and transnational cinemas, theory-based film practice.
Dr Danielle Hipkins
Dr Danielle Hipkins is a Senior Lecturer in Italian, and Director of the Italian Programme. Her research interests focus upon feminist film theory, gender representation in post-war Italian cinema, female prostitutes on screen, spectatorship and post-war Italian cinema and contemporary women's writing and fantastic fiction. She is also in the early stages of developing a new project with colleagues at Bristol and Oxford Brookes which examines the experience and memories of cinema-going in Italy in the 1940s and 1950s.
Dr Stephen Hodge
Dr Stephen Hodge is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and a core member of Wrights & Sites, a group of artist-researchers with a special relationship to site, city/landscape and walking. His research and teaching both focus on contemporary performance (site-specific performance & performance-related practices, and live art). He is a member of the New Theatre Architects and the curator of Theatre, Dance & Live Art at Exeter Phoenix.
Dr Naomi Howell
Naomi Howell is a Research Fellow on the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Speaking with the Dead: Histories of Memory in Sacred Space', and contributes to the linked ERC-funded project 'The Past in its Place'. Her areas of interest include tombs and funerary sculpture in medieval literature and society, particularly in the Anglo-Norman milieu. More broadly, she is interested in the wider cultural and material contexts which inform the relationship of the living with the past. Her research emphasizes the role of the senses, including visuality, in the construction and evocation of memory.
Dr Linda Hurcombe
Dr Linda Hurcombe is a Senior lecturer in Archeology. Dr Hurcombe has broad interests in artefacts and material culture studies. She is especially interested in ethnographies of craft traditions, the sensory worlds of prehistoric societies and the manner in which archaeologists and anthropologists approach artefact studies. Her research is characterised by the extensive use of experimental archaeology and ethnographies, providing a detailed practical understanding of how materials can be transformed into material culture.
Dr Elena Isayev
Dr Elana Isayev is a Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History. Her research interests range from reconstructing histories of pre-Roman groups in south Italy, by using the rich material remains, to deconstructing theories of generation conflict and youth in republican Rome. She is currently working on a major project with the community in Swansea on ideas of Place and Mobility: Future Memory in Place (funded by the AHRC Beyond Text Scheme). The project uses a collaboration of academic and art practice, engaging focus communities of school students and refuges to participants on a journey into the city scape, introducing visual methods to record it, including drawing, colour collection, and digital capture. The project seeks to give an alternative language to participants, through a focus on visual perceptions and modes of communication.
Dr David Houston Jones
Dr David Houston Jones is Director of Visual Culture at Exeter. He works on contemporary French visual culture, including installation art and artistic representations of archives. Other research interests include trauma and testimony and modern French literature and thought. He is a member of the Centre for Intermedia.
Professor James Kearns
Professor James Kearns is Professor of French Nineteenth-Century Studies. His research interests include French writing and the visual arts in the nineteenth century, the art journalism of Théophile Gautier, and the French State, artists and Academy, 1830-1852. He is Principal Investigator and director on the three-year AHRC-funded research project on the history of the Paris Fine Art Salon during the July Monarchy and Second Republic.
Dr Joe Kember
Dr Joe Kember is a Senior Lecturer in Film. His research addresses the development of popular and visual entertainments throughout the Victorian period and early twentieth century, including traditions of performance and representation in early and silent film, magic lantern shows, music hall, fairground, and melodramatic theatre. Research interests in theories and philosophies of everyday life, especially in relation to the representation of space and time in photography, film, and television, have also contributed to work concerning processes of adaptation between these media in ‘city texts' of the 1940s and 50s.
Dr Rebecca Langlands
Dr Rebecca Langlands is a Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History. Her research focuses upon Latin literature and Roman culture, gender and sexuality. Dr Langland’s collaborative project Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History explores the way that both popular and academic ideas about sex and sexuality have been articulated from the 18th century to the present day with reference to erotic material from ancient civilizations, exploring the sexually explicit frescoes from Pompeii and the way tourists have responded to them over the centuries, and the way that museums have dealt with sexually explicit material from Pompeii and Herculaneum and what we call the "censorship myth" in modern scholarship and popular media. Alongside this work is a project entitled Sex and History, which involves working with museums, schools, and other groups throughout the South West to develop ways of using museum artefacts to stimulate discussion about contemporary sexual issues among young people.
Dr Song Lim
Dr Song Lim is a Senior Lecturer in Film. His research specialisms are East Asian (especially trasnsnational Chinese) cinemas, world cinemas, queer theory, issues of Chineseness, and visual representations of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, the first and only English-language, internationally peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to the study of Chinese cinemas.
Dr James Lyons
Dr James Lyons is a Senior Lecturer in Film. His research interests focus upon contemporary American film and television, American indie culture (especially film, comics, and music, and theories of popular culture and taste). He has recently published a book on the television show Miami Vice (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), and has co-edited The Rise of the American Comics Artist with Dr Paul Williams (University Press of Mississippi, 2011).
Dr John Plunkett
Dr John Plunkett is a Senior Lecturer in English. His research centres on Victorian visual culture, particularly illustration, optical toys, photography and visual perception. He is especially interested in popular fiction, optical recreations, photography and the periodical press, and journalism and book history. He also directed an AHRC project on popular visual entertainment in the South West 1840-1910, from 2007-10.
Dr Melisa Moore
Dr Moore is a Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies. Her research interests focus upon Latin American cultural studies: Peruvian literature and culture; indigenism; testimonial writing; intellectual and cultural history and visual culture. Her work on (trans)formative practices, politics and poetics and visual culture in 1920s Peru explores the political and artistic tensions operating during the pivotal years of the ‘oncenio' (1919-1930), through a critical reading of politico-poetic written and visual texts by canonical and non-canonical writers, poets and painters, both Marxist and aprista, such as Mariátegui, Delmar, Adán, Portal and Codesido.
Dr Katharine Murphy
Dr Katharine Murphy is a Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies. Her research interests focus upon Spanish Modernism, Comparative Literature (particularly the Spanish and English Modernist novel), the New Woman in Spanish fiction, and visual culture and the early twentieth-century novel in Spain. Her interdisciplinary project Experiments in Genre: The Modernist Novel in Spain examines the connections between visual culture and the early twentieth-century Spanish novel, seeking to investigate the spatialisation of prose narrative through the incorporation of painting and other visual media, as well as the interactions between the arts, in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century Spain.
Dr Dan North
Dr Dan North is a Lecturer in Film. His research interests include film technology, special effects, animation, puppetry/animatronics in film, and the history of magic and illusion. Dr North has worked extensively with the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture.
Dr Joanne Parker
Dr Joanne Parker is a Lecturer in English. Her research interests focus on Victorian reinventions of the past, the mythologisation of historical figures in the nineteenth century, and the influence of this upon modern culture. Her first book, England's Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great examined the nineteenth-century fascination with the Saxon King Alfred—in literature, but also in fine art, political rhetoric, and public commemoration. She is currently researching for a second academic monograph, on Megaliths and the British Imagination, 1789-2000, which will examine the meanings and significance attributed to stone circles and standing stones by authors and artists from the Romantic period to the modern day.
Dr Chloe Paver
Dr Chloe Paver is a Senior Lecturer in German. Her research interests focus upon museum exhibitions and memorial sites commemorating the Third Reich; cultural memory; representations of the Third Reich in German and Austrian fiction and film, and fiction since the Wende. Dr Paver is undertaking the first wide-ranging investigation of historical exhibitions about the National Socialist era and its legacies. The study, which builds on her published work into the so-called Wehrmachtsausstellung and other photographic exhibitions, takes account of the social and institutional forces that shape these exhibitions and of the ways in which they display the material traces of the past. She is currently pursuing several avenues of investigation: the mobilization of different conceptions of place and space by exhibition-makers; the relationship between the fringes and the establishment in exhibition work; and the relationship between museum objects and the human body.
Dr Vike Martina Plock
Dr Vike Martina Plock is a Lecturer in English. Her research focuses on literary modernism and the cultural history of modernity. She is in the process of writing a research monograph on the centrality of fashion as a cultural force and discourse in the works of early twentieth-century women novelists such as Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Bowen, M. J. Farrell, Rosamond Lehmann, and Agatha Christie.
Professor Ricarda Schmidt
Professor Ricarda Schmidt is a Professor in German. Her research interests include; Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, gender issues and intermediality. Her work on E.T.A. Hoffmann analyses Hoffmann's thematisation of music and art as well as of the contemporary discursive contexts of his intermedial references. Forthcoming Research Projects include Intermediality in 20th-century Literature, exploring 20th-century texts in relation to visual arts and music.
Professor Philip Schwyzer
Professor Philip Schwyzer is Head of English at Exeter. His research focuses on the borders of history, nationalism studies, and archaeology. Archaeology and literary studies intersect in his current project, Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III. This is conceived as a large-scale study, exploring the ‘life-history' of the traces of Richard III's reign (physical, textual, institutional and mnemonic) over the course of a century, from Bosworth Field to the first performance of Shakespeare's play.
Dr Jill Sullivan
Dr Jill Sullivan is Research Network Facilitator for English. Her research interests lie within the field of nineteenth-century theatre and popular entertainment, including regional theatre and alternative sites of performance such as the Victorian bazaar and fetes. She has a particular interest in audiences and the censorship and reception of local and touring entertainments—both professional and amateur.
Dr Cathy Turner
Dr Cathy Turner is a Senior Lecturer in Drama. Her research interests include dramaturgy, writing for performance, the performance of place, space and site, walking performance and the relationship between performance and architecture. She is a core member of artist's collective, Wrights & Sites. Their most recent artwork, 'Everything You Need To Build A Town Is Here' can now be seen in various locations across Western-super-Mare. They are also known for 'Mis-Guides' or alternative guide-books which offer strategies for making familiar places unfamiliar. Dr Turner is also a member of the Centre for Intermedia.
Dr Paul Young
Dr Paul Young is a Senior Lecturer in English. His main research interest is in globalization and imperialism during the Victorian period. His first book, entitled Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order, critically evaluated the Exhibition and the commentary it inspired, arguing that the display at the Crystal Palace was a decisive moment in the formation of a capitalist world picture which became durably embedded in Victorian society. His future work focuses particularly on the way in which different nineteenth-century cultural forms and activities generated and sustained accounts and imaginaries of global communities, space and time.
Phil Wickham
Phil Wickham is Curator of The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture. Phil has written and lectured extensively on film and TV, particularly on British culture and identity. His publications include Understanding Television Text (BFI, 2007) and The Likely Lads (BFI, 2008).
Dr Paul Williams
Dr Paul Williams is a Lecturer in English. His research is concerned with comics and graphic novels. He is the co-editor of The Rise of the American Comics Artist (2010) and is currently looking at erotics, nostalgia, and the book collections that emerged out of the American underground comics scene in the late 1970s. He is also interested in the depiction of African Americans in the work of R. Crumb, and Paul's earlier work explored issues of race and politics across music videos, contemporary graphic novels, and science fiction texts.
Dr Tricia Zakreski
Dr Tricia Zakreski is a Lecturer in English. Her work is primarily in the field of inter-art criticism in the nineteenth century, and has recently focussed on the relationship between women's work and art, exploring the connections that existed between artistic, commercial, and gender economies in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her current project which explores the way in which the principles of design that developed out of the institutionalisation of education in the applied arts influenced the way in which women writers related to their own creative work.
Dr Ulrike Zitzlsperger
Dr Ulrike Zitzlsperger is a Senior Lecturer in German. Dr Zitzlsperger’s research interests focus upon the culture and literature of Twentieth-Century Berlin, and 16th-century culture in Germany. Aspects explored include the role of city myths, literary and autobiographical perceptions of the city, film and photography reflecting public spaces in periods of transition, topographical shifts within the cityscape and the interface between architecture, town-planning and literature. A new research project considers semi-public spaces—predominantly hotels, railway stations and cafés—that reflect and in some cases present a microcosm of fundamental political, social and cultural shifts. This project analyses how historical and political change impacts upon such ‘semi-public' spaces in 20th century Germany and Austria and how they and their literary, photographic, cinematic and journalistic representations in turn shape our (sometimes stereotyped) understanding of particular epochs.
