Dr David Houston Jones
Senior Lecturer in French / Director, Visual Culture
Extension: 4228
Telephone: 01392 724228
Dr David Houston Jones
Director, Visual Culture
I lead the interdisciplinary side of the Art History and Visual Culture initiative at Exeter, comprising a vibrant research culture and a range of undergraduate programmes offered for the first time in 2013-14. We seek to foster a contemporary dialogue between art history and visual culture across the ages and across media, building upon a wealth of cutting-edge research activity. We blog here.
I came to Exeter in 2005, having taught previously at the universities of Bristol, Oxford and Paris VIII Vincennes-St. Denis. My interests span literary and visual culture, from trauma and testimony to visual archives and installation art. From 2013-15 am UK principal investigator on the large-scale EU INTERREG IV-funded research project SCARFACE on the cultural legacy of facial disfigurement, in particular the way practices derived from art and sculpture come to influence surgical techniques, and vice versa.
In 2011, I published Samuel Beckett and Testimony (Palgrave Macmillan). Here, I argued for the first time that testimony helps us understand Beckett's fiction, and that Beckettian narrative helps us understand testimony. I questioned the association of trauma in Beckett's work with the Second World War as historical event, arguing instead that the idea of testimony has to be understood via philosophical and iconographical traditions. In particular, I analysed the debt in Beckett's work to the Noli me tangere tradition and depictions of the crucifixion, a debt which engages with the work of Georges Didi-Huberman on understanding the visual documentation of the Holocaust.
