Researchers and research students

• Professor Stephen Barber is Professor of Visual and Material Culture, Co-Director of Centre. His research interests are in contemporary urban cultures, experimental film and performance art, and Japanese culture, as well as the work of Eadweard Muybridge.
• Professor Fran Lloyd is Professor of Art History, Co-Director of Centre. Her research interests are in émigré artists in post-war Britain, transnational encounters, sculpture and performance.
• Dr Colette Balmain is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media, and researches identity politics with a special interest in East Asian Gothic Cinema.
• Dr Jonathan Black is Senior Research Fellow in Art History and has published widely on British art and culture of the First World War and the inter-war period, and public sculpture.
• Dr Will Brooker is Professor of Film and Cultural Studies. His research explores changing meanings of cultural icons across different historical and cultural contexts.
• Dr Fan Carter is Head of Department of Critical and Historical Studies. She researches and publishes extensively in issues of gender, consumer cultures and print media.
• Professor David Cottington is Professor of Modern Art History and has published widely on Cubism and the histories and theories of avant-garde formations in Europe.
• Dr Corin Depper is Senior Lecturer in Film, and researches issues of memory and interdisciplinary approaches across film and other art forms.
• Dr Azadeh Fatehrad is a postdoctoral researcher and curator. Her interdisciplinary practice-based and historical research engages with postcolonial feminism, the archive and re-presentation.
• Dr Irene González-López is a postdoctoral researcher. Irene's main research interests are Japanese culture and cinema, audiovisual art forms, gender studies, and stardom.
• Dr Maggie Gray is an art historian whose research focuses on the aesthetics and politics of comics. Her monograph Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance, and Dissent is forthcoming from Palgrave.
• Dr Lina Hakim is Lecturer in Visual and Material Culture, with a research focus on the overlaps between the material cultures of science, technology, craft, and play.
• Dr Chris Horrocks is an Associate Professor who publishes widely on art and cultural theory and is a documentary filmmaker with the film production group hijack.
• Dr Kathy Kubicki is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies. Her research focuses on contemporary art, photography, film and video.
• Dr Matthew Melia is Senior Lecturer in Media, and is an authority on the work of the theoretician Antonin Artaud as well as on the film archives of Stanley Kubrick and Ken Russell.
• Dr Janice Miller is Head of Department of Critical and Historical Studies. Her research focuses on fashion, embodiment and performance. She is currently working on her second monograph, which explores the cultural and material significance of makeup.
• Dr Maria Mencia is Associate Professor in Media and Communication and the Course Leader of the BA Media and Communication; she is a celebrated artist-researcher in digital poetics, and has won numerous prizes for her experimental work.
• Dr Helen Julia Minors is the Head of Department of the Performing Arts, and researches widely across music, dance, improvisation, and intercultural topics.
• Professor John Ó Maoilearca is Professor of Film and Philosophy. He is currently engaged in a research project on the work of Moina Mathers, the sister of Henri Bergson.
• Dr Patrick O'Neill is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media, and is an authority on the representation of teenagers in US cinema.
• Dr Shane O'Sullivan is Head of Department of Film, Photography; among his many research projects is the AHRC-funded Make Film History project.
• Helen Potkin is Principal Lecturer and carries out research on performance, the public, and practices outside of the gallery.
• Dr Davina Quinlivan is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies in Film; she has researched the place of breath in cinema, and is author of many monographs across film and art subjects.
• Dr Landé Pratt is Associate Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries, and researches West African cinema as well as professional practice in the creative and cultural industries.
• Professor Trish Reid is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance, and researches the intersection of politics and identity politics in the context of contemporary theatre.
• Dr. Jana Scholze is Associate Professor, Course Director of the MA Curating Contemporary Design and Co-ordinator for Postgraduate Research for the School of Critical Studies and Creative Industries. Her research focuses on theory and practice in curating and contemporary design.
• Dr Vlastimir Sudar is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies, with an emphasis on filmmaking; he is an artist and filmmaker, notably of the film Borders, Raindrops (2018).
• Dr Hager Weslati is the Course Director of the MA in Media and Communication, and an authority on the work of Alexandre Kojève in the context of critical theory and continental philosophy.
• Dr Helen Wickstead is a Senior Lecturer in Museums, Galleries and Heritage. Her archaeological research explores the relationships between modernity and prehistory, aerial photography, and mapping technologies.
• Professor Scott Wilson is Professor of Media and Communication, and researches media and affect; he is also an authority on the work of Scott Walker.

• Professor Marta Braun
• Professor Rebecca Jennison
• Stephen Herbert, Senior Research Fellow
• Dr Robert Knifton
• Dr Soni Kum
• Dr Alice Planel
• Dr Dawn Pereira
• Dr Alex Reynolds
• Dr Yoshiko Shimada
• Toyoko Ito, Research Associate

Current research students

• Mahshad Afshar – Women on both side of the Camera: Representations of Women in Iranian Cinema by Women Filmmakers
• Celeste Baracchi – A Conciliatory Approach: The Feminine in the Signal Strategies of European and North American Art, the 1900s to now
• Helena Cuss (AHRC CDA with Ben Uri Research Institute) – Refugee Art Dealers in London 1933-1960: New Artists, Networks and Approaches
• Stephanie Dieckvoss (AHRC) – An investigation into the use of space in alternative art fairs in the 1990s in Europe and the USA
• Edward Dorrian – Working out of a contested common ground: A politics of drawing as collectivity and organisation
• Livia Dubon Bohlig (AHRC) – Italian Blackness: Decolonising the former Museum of the colonies
• Patrick Henry (AHRC) – The Art Festival: Towards an Alternative Curatorial Logic
• Gareth Fletcher (AHRC) – An analysis of the semiotics of provenance information in establishing symbolic and economic value for objects within the Near Eastern antiquities market
• Bruce Haines (AHRC) – What Might Alternative Methods of Supporting Artists in the Commercial Sector Look Like?
• Ayano Hattori – Memory, Narrative, and the Gaze in Japan after 1945 and 2011
• Sarah Hayward (AHRC) – John Langdon Down's Normansfield: Stories from the Archives and their Contribution to Heritage
• Toyoko Ito (AHRC) – Sagacho Exhibit Space: analysing innovations in art, systems and culture at Japan's pioneering alternative space, across the 1980s and 1990s
• Seoyoung Kim (AHRC) – Reinterpretation of Kingston Museum's Muybridge Collection for contemporary public engagement
• Peter Kirkpatrick – Revisiting the Past to Convey Messages About Today: Engagement with Social and Political Issues in British and American Cinema of the 2010s
• Amber Lamonby-Pennie – Cultural Production in the Digital Age: Art, Design and Fashion School Narratives
• Rosannagh Maddock (AHRC CDA with Brooklands Museum) – Fashion at Speed: Spectacular Histories of Fashion, Flying and Motorsport From the Twentieth Century Collections of Brooklands Museum 1907-1939
• Eva Manticova – Art and the Politics of Counterculture: An Interrogation of the concept of 'influence' between the late 19th century café culture in Paris and the cabaret culture of Dada in Zurich during the Great War, 1881-1916
• Ellie Mumford (AHRC) – Non-binary Performances: The relationship between fashion, identity and the body in individuals with non-binary gender identities
• James Munson – The Language of Chaos
• Mayuren Kumiren Naidoo – Streaming in the Digital Era: Examining the Change in Film Production, Exhibition and Playback Since the Start of the Millennium in the United Kingdom
• Anna Pfautsch (KU studentship) – The Tradition of Social Documentary Photography in the GDR and its impact on Contemporary Documentary Photography Practice
• Sophia Phoca – Feminist meta-narratives: subjectivity and identity in the work of Harun Farocki (PhD by Publication)
• Adam Powell – NWR and the transnational auteur
• Markus Rajala (Kingston Studentship) - Beyond human sense: aporias of animal alterity
• Matthew Richardson (AHRC) – I underline the things you should keep: The visual adaptation of the J.G. Ballard Archive
• Alice (Guo) Rui (government scholarship) – A Comparative Study of Art and Design Education in China and UK
• Gia Strauss – The pursuit of interpretive delirium: Contemporary legacies of surrealist experimentation in film
• Johanna Van Berkum – Willem van Genk, Artist Between Two Worlds: Questions Regarding an Artistic Position
• Christina Viegas – Forensic Archive and Film: Cinema's Role at the Intersection of Memory and Forgetting in the World of Crime during 1970-2020
• Charlotte Warne Thomas (AHRC) – Golden Age; On the Contemporary Agency of Gold
• Lauren Warner-Treloar (AHRC) – Sound Art and Visual Culture: The Anti-Book Experiment in the Romanov Empire and the USSR, 1881-1932

Completed research students

• Karima Al Sholemy – An Intimate Object: A Practice-based Study of the Emirati Burqa (PhD, 2016)
• Ben Angwin (AHRC) – Pre-War Episodes of Modernism in England: An Investigation into the practices of Roger Fry and Herbert Read. (MA by Research, 2013)
• Maria Aroni (University Studentship) – The Aesthetics of Curating: Exhibition-making After the Conceptual Turn (PhD, 2017)
• Christine Atchison – Readership, Religion, Media and Superhero Narratives: An Exploration of Transcendental Style and Meaning-making in Comic Books and Film (PhD, 2021)
• Jim Backhouse (AHRC) – The ‘Collective Phantom': Convergent Networks, counterculture and the recomposition of the radical political subject (MA by Research, 2012)
• Kathryn Baird (nee Main) (AHRC) – To What Extent is there an opportunity for contemporary art consumption among London based small to medium enterprises (SMEs)? (MA by Research, 2008)
• Pamela Breda (KU studentship) – The Quintessence: An artistic exploration of the visual imagery of outer space (PhD, 2021)
• James Church – A Diplomatic Art: The United Kingdom and the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, c. 1910-1931 (PhD, 2022)
• Mathieu Copeland – Manifest Paper Exhibitions: Curating as a Radical Re-materialisation of Forms (PhD by Publication/Portfolio, 2021)
• David Cowlard – Photourbanism Documentary Photography and Urban Thinking (MA by Research, 2010)
• Ruth Debney – Personality, Patronage and Publishing:  The Creative Relationships of Artist, Writer and Publisher in the Formation of Artistic Publishing in Fin de siecle London (MA by Research, 2008)
• Anthony Escott – Alan Cuthbert: Colour Theory and Practice and  English Art School Change in the early 1960s (PhD, 2005)
• Lucia Farinati (University Studentship) – Audio Arts Archive: From Inventory Space to Imagined Space (PhD, 2020)
• Hazel Frizell (University Scholarship) – Representations of specific concerns of the women's liberation movement in British feminist art, 1970-1978 (PhD, 2009). Further details (PDF).
• Rebecca Fortnum – The Vision of Others: works by Rebecca Fortnum (PhD by Publication/Portfolio, 2019)
• Kit Hammonds – I Am Doing Curating Now (and Then) (PhD by Publication/Portfolio, 2019)
• Ayano Hattori – You Saw Nothing: Sight, Digital Video, Post 3.11 Japan (PhD, 2021)
• Nina Holmes (University Scholarship) – State-issued Design in the 20th Century: Irish Government Health Campaigns: 1970s–1990s (PhD, 2018)
• Indre Jakucione – In search of lost motherhood: the representation of the mother-daughter relationship in contemporary cinema (PhD, 2018)
• Mercy Kagia – Documenting Daily Life through Reportage Drawing (PhD, 2013)
• Marianne Keating (KU Studentship) – ‘They Don't Do Much In The Cane-Hole Way': Hidden Histories of The Irish Diaspora In Jamaica (PhD, 2022)
• John Keefe – A Spectatorial Dramaturgy: Ethical Principles of Recycling, Habitus and Estrangement (PhD by Publication, 2013)
• Ellen Kirkpatrick – A Curious Tale of Transformation – The promise and perils of representing Superheroes (PhD, 2019)
• Pirrko Koppinen – Itineraries and Museum Objects: A Study of a Tanner's Logbook (PhD, 2021)
• Juliette Kristensen (University Scholarship) – Writing Acts: The Rise of Mechanised Writing and the Body of Modernity, 1711 - 1905 (PhD, 2012)
• Christina Lambrou – The Modernist Horizons of Adamantios Diamantis: Visual Politics and Cultural Narratives in Twentieth-Century Cyprus (PhD, 2022)
• Rahat Masud – Materialising the Spiritual in Contemporary Painting in Pakistan: An Artist's Exploration of Figurative Art and Sufism (PhD, 2010). Further details (PDF).
• Rosalind McKever – Futurism and the Past Temporalities, avant-gardism and tradition in Italian art and its histories 1909-1919 (PhD, 2013)
• Katya Micallef (government scholarship) – Understanding the Context of Contemporary Visual Art in Malta from 1989 to 2018: A Curator's Perspective (PhD, 2020)
• Joana P. B. Neves (AHRC) – Following the Indexical Line: Etienne-Jules Marey, Douglas Huebler, Sol LeWitt (PhD, 2020)
• Patrick O'Neill – Investigating the 1980s Hollywood Teen Genre:  Adolescence, Character, Space (PhD, 2016)
• Daniel Palmer – Exhibiting Practice: Retrospective Survey Exhibitions of Conceptual Art 1989 - 2000 (PhD, 2007)
• Kaja Pawelak (KU studentship) – (KU Studentship) – The City as Stage: Reading Poland's Post-Socialist Transformation Through Art Practices in (and on) Public Space in Warsaw (PhD, 2022)
• Mary Pearce – Colour and Communication in Twentieth Century Abstract Art (PhD, 2001)
• Alice Planel (AHRC) – Artists of Algerian origin exhibiting in France in 1989–2012:  An analysis of selected artists' work and its reception – the urban, the home and the Arab woman, and the ‘global' art world (PhD, 2014)
• Ana Filipa Gonçalves Ramos - The Zoological Apparatus—Chris Marker, Simone Fortiand, Joan Jonas' artistic engagement with animals (PhD, 2022)
• Ann Rau Dawes – Milein Cosman:  A Critique of the Biography and Representation of the Jewish Émigré Artist 1939-1959  (MA by Research, 2013) 
• Alice Rekab – A non-standard art practice: hypotheses on thought and making through text, video and sculpture. (PhD, 2018)
• Alexandra Reynolds (AHRC) – Crowdsourcing, Curating and Network Power: Towards a Critical Crowdsourced Cultural Archive (PhD, 2016)
• Michael Robinson – The Dealer System in Early 20th Century Britain (MA by Research, 2005)
• Michael Saunders – The Inward Light: Messianic Immanence and Radical Nonviolence in Henry and Laruelle (PhD, 2020)
• Tia Shafee – Canon v Headcanon: Gender and Fan Self-Identification In the Search for Autistic Representation On Television (MA by Research, 2022)
• Yoshiko Shimada – Gendaishicho-sha Bigakkō:  Undercurrents in Japanese Art and Politics from 1960 to 1975 (PhD, 2015)
• Deborah Smith – Present Places, Absent Faces: The Artist Thelma Hulbert from Childhood to First Exhibition (1950). (MA by Research, 2022).
• Lina Stergiou – The Concept of the Avant-Garde in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Architecture.  History, Theory, Criticism (PhD, 2015)
• Eliza Tan (University Scholarship) – Yoshiko Shimada:  Art, Feminism and Memory in Japan after 1989 (PhD, 2016)
• Phillip Warnell – Anatomy of the Incorporeal (PhD by Publication/Portfolio, 2020)
• Jane Wildgoose (University Scholarship) – Collecting and Interpreting Human Skulls and Hair in Late Nineteenth Century London: Passing Fables & Comparative Readings at The Wildgoose Memorial Library. An artist's response to the DCMS Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums (2005) (PhD, 2015)
• Valerie Webb – Representations of Class and Gender in Selected Paintings of London Interiors by Artists Belonging to the Camden Town Group (MPhil, 2003)
• Sarah Zaidan – The Adventures of MetaMan: The Superhero as a Metaphor for Modern Western Masculinity (1940-2010) (PhD, 2011). Further details (PDF)
• Aleksandra Zavjalova – Small voices, big narratives: Problems of remembering and identifying the Post-Soviet Space.  The case of Stalinist architectural ensemble in Sillamae, Estonia (MA by Research, 2013)

See example career trajectories of former research students.